The long, rich and despotic history of Iran in Empire of The Mind

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Though pride insists that we have the right to act as we choose, our wills unfettered by the shackles of anyone else's desire, we are, inescapably, beings shaped by history. History is the gestalt of our experiences, the joys and traumas, the victories and the defeats, that, by individually imprinting themselves upon us, collectively influence our futures. We can try to recognize these influences in hopes of minimizing them, or perhaps even with an eye towards completely weeding them out, but how can we mitigate something we can't even measure? How can we extricate the fallout from something that has already happened to us? As much as individuals struggle with answering these questions, nations are equally subject to them. For what is a nation if not the collective will of human beings who share geography, culture, history? What scars the people scars the nation as well and leaves behind marks that take centuries to fade. The experiences of many nations provide evidence of this truth, but few more vividly, or tragically, than Iran. Michael Axworthy elaborates in his piece of narrative history of this consequential country. Home to one of the world's oldest human civilizations, Iran is a nation as fascinating as it is troubled. For millennia, it has produced poets and scholars, theologians and mathematicians, whose insights and revelations have both enriched the world and advance the scope of human knowledge. It has hosted dynasties and religions, groundbreaking universities and defined entire disciplines of science. Without it, the world, and the peoples that populate it, would be exceedingly different. And yet, for all of this glorious history, for all that its culture makes the Ancient Greeks look like Johnny-come-latelies, its recent past has been ravaged by the plagues of corruption, colonialism and conflict, all of which have taken its toll on this proud nation. Made a pawn in the Great Game of the 19th century, in which the British and Russian empires vied for regional dominance, and made a slave to oil interests in the 20th century, during which its politics and its institutions were ruthlessly manipulated by foreign governments and foreign corporations, it has become a suspicious theocracy, one that seeks, through the favor of god, to wrestle back its rightful place, as one of the world's premier nations, the first amongst younger equals. But the world is not what it was when Iran was a center of culture and knowledge. And it may well be that Iran cannot return to the prominence it claimed for so long. An exploration of the long history of a singular nation, Empire of The Mind is a riveting portrait of a country transformed by the insights of science and by the vicissitudes of geography. Mr. Axworthy, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter, transports us back millennia, before the Romans, before even the Greeks, and gradually marches us into the present, introducing, along the way, religions, scientists and kings that have characterized this place of mountains and faith. The reader witnesses the fall of Zoroastrianism and the rise of Islam, the decline of tribalism and the assembly of the nation state, the destruction of pluralism and the elevation of theology. But for all these potent forces, none prove as consequential as colonialism. The world is not short of examples of colonialism's cruelties. It seems, at times, that half the world has suffered beneath its ruinous shadow. And yet, Iran has escaped most of the obvious consequences, instead, bearing up under more subtle and insidious damage. Perhaps, this is owing to the fact that Iran was more of a client state than a colony, its interests, and therefore its policies, torn between the various western powers fighting for dominance in the 19th century. This subservience certainly engendered a sense of humiliation within such a proud culture. And yet, this anger would be but a rehearsal for the outpouring of betrayal and rage that would come later, during the 20th-century's thirst for oil, when Wilsonian promises of self-determination gave way to the ruthless politics of necessity that undermined their governments, manipulated their intellectuals and empowered their dictators. For those of us fortunate enough to have been reared in countries spared the indignity of being subjected to the merciless will and the selfish whimsy of other nations, this shame is difficult to relate to. The West looks at Iran today and sneers at its theocracy and expresses incredulity over the insanity of its nuclear weapons program. But while the convergence of these forces is certainly cause for dismay, they should be properly understood as the consequences of meddling, of manipulation, of exploitation. For in the minds of a people, whose culture has been forgotten and whose sovereignty has been toyed with, what could possibly germinate but distrust? Put in this situation, we would all want the security of knowing that we would never again be someone else's tool. While maintaining an admirable neutrality, Empire of The Mind conveys not just the history of Iran but the powerful ways in which that history has informed the problematic present. This is no mean feat, particularly for a work that strives to be much more than an ideological weapon with which to chastise one's enemies. It is far easier to descend into the language of victimization and or excusemaking. That Mr. Axworthy avoids this while delivering an engaging read on a consequential country makes this one of my more thoughtful reads this year, only marred by the fact that its publishing, coming in 2007, denies the author the opportunity to read Iran's history into the failed Green Revolution and the events of the Arab Spring. Quality work... (4/5 Stars)

An unparalleled view of a darkly divided Israel in My Promised Land

From The Week of February 24, 2014

As much as we are individuals, endowed with our own wills, our own freedoms and our own futures, our lives are profoundly shaped by our ancestors and the lands into which they delivered us. We may rebel against them as a means of establishing our own identities, but the traditions, the habits, the pursuits that they considered important bed down in us until, eventually, we recognize their value and incorporate them into our own worldview. For the fortunate, these inherited values are confined to trivialities like what sporting teams we favor and what kind of manners we hold dear, but for those cultures who have suffered grievously at the hands of others, these values are fundamental to who they are, a series of unbroken vows made to those who died so that others may live. Rarely has this life-defining notion been so exquisitely captured than in Ari Shavit's sociopolitical history of Israel.

A meager strip of coastal and desert land hugging the Mediterranean sea, Israel has been for 60 years, a beacon of democracy and innovation in the Middle East. A fraction of the size of most of its neighboring nations, with whom it is on uneasy terms, it has, since its creation in 1948, consistently and stubbornly fended off annexation, defeating militaristic threats to its sovereignty with superior technology and tactics. Throughout, it has provided a proud and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people who, after the fall of Judea to the Romans in the 1st century, had been forced to nomadically roam through Asia and Europe, spending 1,900 years persisting in lands peopled by those who welcomed them and abhorred them. This disenfranchised journey came to an end in the Second World War when the Nazis' genocidal hatred made it clear that the Jewish people would never be safe living under foreign suns.

However, as much as Israel is an astonishing success, as much as its economic and industrial revolutions have shaped it into a land to be envied and a power to be feared, this triumph has come at a terrible cost to the Palestinian people who occupied this land prior to 1948. Muted and marginalized, their lands stolen and their region transformed, the Palestinians have been forced to watch while their homeland has been developed into a paean to the West: its institutions, its culture and its excesses. This transformation has fuelled resentments, grudges that have hardened with time and ill deeds, into malignancy that eats away at the heart of the Israeli miracle, burdening this new nation with the curse of its problematic founding.

A remarkable, first-hand journey through the 60 years of Israeli history, My Promised Land is a frank, confrontational and profoundly personal accounting of life in the world's first Jewish country in nearly 2,000 years. Mr. Shavit, a journalist for one of Israel's most prominent newspapers, collects the family histories of several of Israel's key luminaries, including that of his own father, and uses them to characterize the political and cultural forces that shape Israeli existence. In this, his work calls to mind George Packer's The Unwinding, an outstanding work of non-fiction with which My Promised Land is more than capable of keeping up. For it is an aggressive, unflinching and honest examination of the actions and the trends that have brought Israel to its present-day crisis with the Arab world.

Of its many virtues, My Promised Land provides the reader with a profound understanding of Zionism, that potent skein of Jewish belief that both founded their nation and seeded its future troubles. The author personalizes the crimes against the Jewish people, elevating them from textbook abstractions into living and breathing atrocities for which there had to be some kind of permanent solution. That became Israel, a land come refuge from tyranny and genocide, a land raised up by Jewish ingenuity and determination into modernity. Here, the indefatigable Jewish spirit is represented with such potence, as the reader watches deserts turned into orange groves, turned into industry, turned into commercial and residential developments, that one is left aglow with a wealth of respect and amazement for these dogged people who, armed with nothing, made a paradise out of sand.

Mr. Shavit could have left it at admiration. He could have penned his paean to Israel's founders and left well enough alone. Instead, in his harsh criticisms of Israel's handling of the displaced Palestinians, he exposes an intellectual honesty that lends his work moral heft. It is not an easy matter to lionize and criticize the same people, but the author manages this with a mixture of fire and class that captures the spirit of heated debate without descending into cynicism and ideology. This caustic fire he reserves for the subsequent generations which he clearly feels have betrayed the spirit of the Founders by squandering their gifts, their efforts, their sacrifices, in a land of hedonistic play and political backbiting. In this, he sounds like all social and political commentators of a certain age, men and women who so celebrate the past that the present seems a pale shadow.

From the Founders to the Ultra-orthodox fundamentalists, from Labor to the hard Right, from the orange groves to Startup Nation, My Promised Land is a sweeping, lively depiction of Israeli life that marvels at its successes and mourns its moral failings. It does not have answers. It does not even have proscriptions. It has only hope, hope that the divisive figures in power today do not ruin the glory of what great men and women devoted themselves to create. He sees a country deeply divided, a country that is increasingly religious and increasingly blind to its own turpitude, but he also remembers that all of this was once, not so long ago, hills and dust. Some measure of that spirit surely lives on today.

A dark and beautiful journey... (4/5 Stars)

An engaging study of the lifecycle of civilizations in Revenge of Geography

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though it is an exercise fraught with failure and misapprehension, there are few tasks more worthwhile than the effort to improve our understanding of the cultures from which we come. For, despite the challenges, despite having to constantly check for ones biases and preconceptions, there is no better way to advance one's culture than to grasp the influences, the logistics and the the history that informs it and to separate these truths from the stereotypes that so often characterize national cultures. There are reasons for why our countries are the way they are, why some are rude and others prickly. And the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can begin to predict the future with some modest accuracy. This Robert Kaplan studiously demonstrates in his examination of the world viewed through the lens of geography.

For ten-thousand years, civilizations both grand and small, both coastal and landlocked, have risen and fallen. Some crumbled into dust with barely a lasting mark to remember them by. Others immortalized their legacies through engineering and enduring monuments that have left no doubt of the links they forged in the unbroken chain of humanity's march towards a more knowledgeable future. However, despite having different languages and assets, populations and ethics, lifespans and legacies, they did, all possess one common trait. They all eventually collapsed, their prowess and their vigor consumed by younger, energetic states. This inescapable fate has prompted both historians and interested parties to analyze this perfect mortality rate and divine from it lasting clues that might help stave off the inevitable deaths of current cultures.

Though this has given rise to nearly as many universal theories as their are studiers of this question, few are as simple as Mr. Kaplan's. Setting aside the monumental fields of economics and law, politics and multiculturalism, he contends that the ultimate fates of nations are written into their geographies. From the vital rivers that organized and then gave rise to cohesive cultures in China and Egypt to the sweeps of coastal-rich territory in Europe and North America, he argues that these invaluable resources concentrate populations which in turn innovate and inflate until they've become regional powers capable of spanning entire continents.

This would seem to be a wise, and even pleasingly unbiased, assessment of why some nations stabilize and succeed while others disintegrate and fail, but is it applicable in a 21st-century world where bombers and drones, have overcome the once-formidable natural barriers that have historically held nations back? Mr. Kaplan believes so. In fact, he is convinced that these technologies which have so effectively reduced mountains to molehills have created a whole host of new existential problems for humanity's various national tribes. After all, prior to the age of flight, India never had to worry about China. The Himalayas took care of any fear of invasion on both sides of that question. The same for nations separated by substantial waterways that would've taken weeks to traverse in centuries past that now take hours. The globalization of the world may have revolutionized trade, but it has opened up theatres of conflict that would have been unthinkable in times past.

The Revenge of Geography is an engaging analysis of 21st-century geopolitics informed by a first-rate mind. Mr. Kaplan has an admirable grasp of the present that is informed by both an intriguing read of geography and an educational grasp of the past civilizations that comprise known history. It explains south Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America in a manner that is no less explicable for it being erudite. And yet, there's a blitheness here that haunts his study no less than it does all those that purport to boil the world down to a single, defining trait. There can be no doubting that geography has played vital role in the shaping of our nations and our cultures, but can the success of he United States really be put down simply to the fact that it had manageable neighbors to north and south, plentiful coast to east and west, and abundant heartland in which to spread out and thrive? Factors all, surely, but far from the only ones to be heard in the formation of the defining nation of the last 200 years...

But though Revenge of Geography may state its case too definitively, it does so in an unforgettable manner. For Mr. Kaplan introduces us here to intellectuals who conceive of the world, and even history, as a series of existential conflicts for dominance. Art and science, philosophies and customs, are discarded by the minds of these men and replaced with a heartless pragmatism that is predicated on the idea that governments seek always to expand not only their powers but their borders as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this cynical view, but there's just as much evidence to counter it as well. For while states may act in the interests of the people they contain, willing to go to war for gains both economic and territorial, people are often far more emotional and far less strategic than this. They would rather live in a world that is not zero-sum, a world where everyone has a fair shot of progress and comfort, rather than one in which their interests are mercilessly advanced at the expense of everyone else. The utterly pragmatic approach here is as striking as it is narrow.

There's much of value here, but for all Mr. Kaplan's skill, he fails to convince us that geography trumps ideology or cultural ethos. Nonetheless, well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)

The history of Sharia detailed in Kadri's Heaven on Earth

From The Week of April 22, 2013

Humanity's relationship with the unknown has had a long and thorny history. For our minds are not predisposed to logic. They have not evolved to bring patience and reason to bear as weapons against the mysteries of the world. Rather, they have evolved from a violent and tribal foundation that perpetuated the species long before we possessed language, let alone a written system with which to express it. With this in mind, it is understandable that science is far more alien to us than god. For, when assessing the beauty of a flower, who among us has the skill and the rigor to tease out the biological and botanical truths that make it so when it is so much easier to credit its glory to god? And yet, we must understand this deficit and overcome it. If we do not strive for better answers than the ones that rely purely on spiritualism, then the thorny, and often tragic, result is what Sadakat Kadri describes in so much detail in his engaging history of Sharia.

Descending from both the Quran, Islam's holy book, and the Sunnah, the deeds and declarations of Islam's prophet Mohammed, Sharia is a collection of codes of conduct that define, for Muslims, the standards and obligations of the good life. From laws to economics, from the duties of prayer to the dictates of divorce, Sharia provides a societal tapestry that, in knitting together the public and private spheres, creates, in theory, a harmony amongst Muslim lands, all of which must adhere to these codes to be considered righteous. It provides for charity and mutual obligation. It implements safeguards against the excesses of aristocracy while protecting the underprivileged. It unites the rights of the individual with his or her obligation to the greater good, remarkable sentiments considering that they emanate from the relative intellectual darkness of the seventh century.

For all its virtues, however, for all that it provides the building blocks of a moral society, Sharia is an ever-moving target, a school of ethics that, in the centuries since the death of its progenitors, have been constantly re-interpreted by a series of powerful Islamic scholars. The views of these men have, over the years, been taken up by their adherents and organized into schools of thought and belief that often stand in opposition to one another. Without a centralized, authoritarian body to act as the final arbiter on the understanding of, and implementation of, these disputes, these schools have been allowed to perpetuate, making impossible the unity of Sharia's promise. Some of these disputes are merely doctrinal, having only a passing effect on the lives of those who live under its sway, but some are not only consequential, but severe, leading to the enshrinement of violent views that have fuelled the clash of civilizations.

Narrating both Sharia's history and its consequences, Heaven on Earth is a fascinating and multi-faceted work that endeavors to educate its readers on the nature of this codified morality and to weigh up what responsibility it bears for modern Islamic fundamentalism. Mr. Kadri, a lawyer and journalist by trade, approaches this sensitive topic systematically, resurrecting the towering figures of Sharia's past and using their views as a means of describing the evolution of Sharia and its application. Consequently, in the work's first part, the reader is exposed to not only well-known figures like Mohammed, but the men, Ahmad ibn Handal and Ibn Taymiyyah to name but two, who endeavored to interpret him and whose writings were in turn deployed by their followers as a means of justifying their view of the world.

In the work's second part, Mr. Kadri leaves behind this dense but edifying history and returns the reader to modern day where Sharia is more often used as a means of exercising power than it is as a code of ethics for an honorable society. Mr. Kadri explores the views of fundamentalists and their organizations, leaving no doubt in the mind of the reader that their vehemence is less an outgrowth of Islam than it is a byproduct of individuals who find, in hate and violence, a comforting sense of power and order that helps them explain the cultural and economic dominance of the west. Galvanized by Islamic scholars reacting to the Western sin of colonialism which has had a profoundly deleterious impact on the Islamic world, they seek justification to punish and castigate outsiders while holding their own adherents to impractically high standards of conduct and belief. This is the work's most potent section. For it deals directly with issues western societies grapple with every day, providing context to what otherwise seems so senseless.

There are flaws here. Mr. Kadri's work assumes that its readers have a pre-existing familiarity with Islam. Moreover, it moves through history at an almost dizzying pace, leaving the reader little time to grow accustomed to changing mores. Both of these problems would have been solved by lengthening the chronicle and providing the reader with a more leisurely swim through the tides of history. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a document that has resulted from extraordinary research.

Sharia's clash with western ideas of society and human rights will never entirely end. For these two traditions have taken entirely different evolutionary tracks which have caused them to place different values on commonly held ethics. God and secularism, obligation and individual rights... These are oil and water, leaving the rest of us to try to learn what we can as a means of better understanding our world and our fellows. To that end, Mr. Kadri's work does us all a service. (4/5 Stars)

the West's intellectual debt to the Arab world in The House of Wisdom

From The Week of April 8, 2013

Human history is defined by instability, a tumultuous sea of clashing cultures the waves of which bear aloft the victorious while its depths claim the defeated. And yet, such fortunes, or misfortunes, do not linger long. For like with the brief, violent life cycle of a wave, the victorious can be easily drowned. For in order for a culture to climb to the peak of civilization, it must innovate and create; it must streamline and strategize; but mostly it must supplant its foes, foes who, in the darkness of their subordination, nurse their battered pride and make of their wounds an enduring enmity that, someday, will contribute to a change at the top. Supremacy can never last forever. This much, if little else, Jonathan Lyons elucidates in his troubled history.

In the centuries following the death of the Roman Empire, while Europe was enshrouded in the gloom of cultural stagnancy and religious zealotry, the Middle East was experiencing a new dawn. The inheritors of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, thanks to the alexandrian scholars who preserved such knowledge, the formerly disparate and warring tribes of Arabia had, under Mohammed, forged themselves into a new kind of empire, one built on the principles of a single book designed to provide a moral and political framework for their civilization. Eventually based in Baghdad, this Arab society flourished under a succession of rulers who encouraged scholarly learning, fashioning their subsequent insights into innovations that could transform their cities into palaces that would forever leave behind the plains of the dusty deserts from which they'd come.

From astronomy to philosophy, from the measuring of the earth to the understanding of the human body, this Arab awakening endured for more than three centuries, hundreds of years in which their doctors and metaphysicists would have been the envy of the world if the rest of the world, at least to the West, had not descended into superstition and ignorance. Thoughtful souls from far and wide came to learn at the court of these Arab masters until the rise of the Mongols ended all that they had built, smashing it beneath the hooves of their mountainous horses. Fragments remained. These same Arab tribes remained powerful enough to overthrow Byzantium and to make of Constantinople the seat of a new, Ottoman empire, but the dream of wisdom was over, leaving it to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution to catalyze the advancement of civilization and transform the world into one empowered by western commerce and western technology.

For all its research, for all that it illuminates centuries of world history spitefully ignored by a self-referential West consumed by its own manifest destiny, The House of Wisdom is deeply flawed work. Mr. Lyons' intentions are good, to right a historical wrong by elevating to their proper place of prominence those Arab kings and thinkers who preserved and then improved upon the knowledge of the ancients and, in doing so, created an advanced civilization. However, instead of immersing the reader in the lives of these men and women, largely unknown to western minds, instead of bringing them to life with their histories, their struggles, their crowning achievements, the author chooses to castigate the dimness of western thought during the Middle Ages, devoting swaths of his history to describing Western barbarism and the many wars and tribulations that resulted from it. He must have intended for this to provide some kind of contrast to Arab learning. And yet, his tone is unavoidably reproachful of a culture that is now centuries dead and, thus, unable to hear his howls.

There are some exceptional Arab minds represented here. al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi, amongst others, have numerous pages devoted to their deeds. And so the tome is not without moments of clarity that educate the reader. Moreover, Mr. Lyons is certainly right to argue that the Western mind receives an inexplicably skewed education in history, with the West forever marching towards enlightenment and freedom while the rest of the world is mired in chaos and darkness. And to whatever extend the author's work here corrects that gross misapprehension makes the enterprise worthwhile. But Mr. Lyons does not celebrate Arab learning. He uses it to sneer at a medieval West lost to doctrine. For proof of this, one needs only look to the work's protagonist,Adelard of Bath, who, despite being a fascinating character in his own right, is a westerner who realizes his culture is hopelessly behind Arab society. Yes, Adelard brings some Arab learning to the West, satisfying one of Mr. Lyons' themes here, but what he gains in this he more than loses in not truly embracing his subject, the prominence and power of post-roman Arabia.

This could have been wonderful work. But its twisted perspective ties it in knots from which it never untangles itself. A shame. For Its cause is just. The torch will have to fall to another to be carried forth. (2/5 Stars)

The extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell in The Desert Queen

From The Week of February 18, 2013
Life, under ordinary circumstances, is challenging enough as it is. Its roadblocks and digressions, pitfalls and pratfalls, at best, require years to be disentangled and, at worst, allow us never to recover from their terrible grip. But what of those among us who are ahead of their time? What of those who devote themselves to ideas and pursuits that seem perfectly sensible to them but to the rest of us seem senseless? If life, to us, is a series of obstacles, then, for them, it must be a mountain up which ones full span on this earth must be spent in the climbing. The summit might someday be reached, but at what cost, to them and to those who love to question, to challenge, to take a different road? In examining the life of one of Victorian England's most adventurous heroines, Ms. Wallach asks this very question. The answer is decidedly bleak.

The eldest daughter of a British steel magnate, Gertrude Bell was born in 1869, at the height of stodgy, Victorian England. Possessing a keen mind and a determined disposition, she rejected the narrow life of a stayed and dignified British lady to excel at Oxford University before ambitiously embarking upon a series of gruelling travels through the Middle East. Supported by her family's wealth, she was free to indulge her passion for adventure, be it climbing the Swiss alps or traipsing through Arabian deserts, without ever having to settle down, much less marry.

Until the First World War, she was a creature of more social than political consequence. A position in the civil service denied to her because of her gender, she explored in obscurity until the Ottoman Empire signed on with imperial Germany and entered the Great War by attempting to conquer Arabia. Starved for intelligence on the area, the British government turned desperately to their citizens in the region, hoping that they might sufficiently understand this tangle of tribesmen and blood feuds in order to fashion from them a workable alliance. One of their primary sources of information, Gertrude Bell was effectively admitted into the British civil service, beginning a career that would not only last a decade, but make her a prime mover in the creation of both Iraq and Jordan, modern nations drawn out of the sands of Arabia. In this, she became a shaper of the policies of the world's most powerful empire, a startling achievement given the patriarchal nature of British society at the time.

Though somewhat bloated at over 500 pages, The Desert Queen is a fascinating glimpse of a most complex life. Gertrude Bell was, at once, both a maverick and a conservative. For even while she was busting the chains of propriety that threatened to enslave her own existence, she was staunchly patriotic. An imperialist and a royalist, she was a traditionalist who believed so deeply in the fundamental myths of the empire that birthed her that she was willing to side with them against her own gender, rejecting the suffragette movement in favor of the benefits and privileges of her class. In this, she is a messy creature, defying easy categorization. Rather than shunning this reality for a simpler narrative, Ms. Wallach embraces the contradictions of Ms. Bell's life and, in doing so, does her the justice this largely forgotten heroine deserves.

Though this tome is, in the main, a biography of the life of Gertrude Bell, it is also, necessarily, a history of the creation of the modern Middle East. Ms. Wallach ably walks the reader through the process by which the British drew up these nations on a map, providing the work its central tragedy. For in this, we watch, with nearly a hundred years of hindsight, the arrogance that lead these imperialists to believe they could re-shape an entire region of the world without grave consequences. They, and the world, would eventually pay dearly for this presumption, as it helped to fuel tribal clashes that would eventually result in not only distrust towards the West, but revolution, war and terrorism across the greater Levant. And this is perhaps why Bell is hardly remembered. For this act of creation was her life's primary political achievement, an act which is now looked upon with, at best, bemusement and, at worst, scorn.

In the end, Gertrude Bell was a mirror for the Iraq she loved. She possessed the best of intentions, but these were overtaken by narrow mindedness and stubbornness, qualities which prevented her, and her British kin, from measuring the cost of their actions. Thanks to Ms. Wallach's fine work, we feel all of this acutely, mourning the opportunity lost as much as the life uncelebrated. (4/5 Stars)

Lives of every-day Iranians detailed in Alison Wearing's Honeymoon in Purda

From The Week of December 3, 2012
As much as the connections between humanity's various societies have been deepened by the Internet, in both its capacity to expose and unite, life beyond our customary borders is still foreign to us. For there is no land like the one that reared us. We know its rhythms and its eccentricities, the beauty of its trees and the sweetness of its air. We speak its language with a fluidity that we shall never lose. And so everything we encounter outside that bubble is filtered through the lens of our native land. It is not simply accepted as is, or how it should be. It is compared and contrasted by minds seeking always to find the right way of things when there is no such way. There is only what is. And the sooner we understand that, the easier it will be for us to accept the unknown and the foreign. This is a lesson wonderfully illustrated in Ms. Wearing's travel log which is no less relevant for its age.

For most of us in the West, Iran is a fascinating enigma, a proud nation about which very little is concretely known. We hear about its faiths and its leaders, its oil and its revolution, but we know next to nothing about its ordinary citizens, their lives, their customs, their pasttimes. To those uninterested in politics, this is incomprehensible. After all, as one of the oldest inhabited territories in the world, Iran occupies a unique place in human history, one that has not only captivated scholars but engrossed anthropologists attempting to trace the history of our species. But to those who do wrap themselves in current events, the answer to this dearth of knowledge is all-too-depressingly obvious. For as a consequence of western colonialism and general interference in its government and its resources, Iran is an intensely closed society, commanded by a government highly suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts.

Heedless of this impediment and eager to see the world, two youthful Canadians set out to explore this mysterious nation. Masquerading as husband and wife in order to smooth their passage through a more rigid culture, Ms. Wearing and Ian, her gay companion devote five months of the year 2000 to traveling through Iran's cities and villages, its mountains and its deserts, its snows and its sweltering heat. And even though Ms. Wearing spends much of the journey enshrouded in conservative, Islamic garb, in deference to the sensitivities of the people they encounter, she is able to experience this distant country with the intensity of an artist, and through the eyes of a woman for whom everything she sees is foreign. Her experiences are unforgettable.

Writing with the passion of a painter and the literary flair of a diarist, Ms. Wearing's Honeymoon in Purda is an oddly affecting work of non-fiction that touches on the philosophical as much as it does the practical. Unapologetic of her open, western sensibilities, the author is simultaneously respectful of the traditions of the land she's chosen to explore, immersing herself, for better or worse, in the habits and the rituals of a very foreign place. This cultural awareness not only prevents her work here from drifting into smugness or self-involvement, it exposes her to people who, despite holding very different political and cultural views, are ready and willing to engage with her. Honeymoon in Purda makes it clear that we are imbibing the thoughts of a rare mind, unencumbered by the narrowness of age and or prejudice.

Naturally, there are moments when Alison and Ian grate upon the reader. However, this is as much a credit to them as a curse to the work. For it is a consequence of their willingness to be seen at their worst, not a result of a failing of character. And in any event, the extent to which they expose us to Christians and Mexicans, to drug-dealers and beleaguered wives, to eager shopkeepers and hospitable soldiers, more than makes up for any frustrations one might have for the pair's foibles. This is Iran as it has rarely been seen, Iran as it may not be seen again for some time, more's the pity.

Honeymoon in Purda is a lovely chronicle of a life-altering journey that is elevated above the fray by its characters, both exhilarating and depressing. Some literary license has to have been taken, to have so accurately transcribed so many of the conversations that take place here, but this is a flaw that does nothing to reduce my appreciation. (4/5 Stars)

As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury

From The Week of July 16, 2012

All that we've built, from the roads to the towers, from the places of learning to the places of worship, the entire edifice of civilization, would not be possible without communication. It is the means by which we not only understand one another, but the means by which we cooperate, pooling our talents and our efforts in the realization of a single goal we could not have achieved individually. But what is the best form of communication?

Language stakes a compelling claim. After all, we can speak it swiftly and dynamically, allowing for complex ideas to be reduced to fairly simple verbal codes. But language is also fragmentary, subject to a kind of geographic drift that causes its codes to mutate until they mean different things to different people. Symbols, meanwhile, are equally potent but also equally challenging. For as much as they benefit from a simplicity of form, allowing the mind to ruminate on their essences without needing linguistics to parse their meanings, this makes them even more malleable. For symbols might end up meaning entirely different things to siblings, let alone to strangers. Which leaves us with dreams, those ephemeral voyages through the armed and dangerous subconscious, a place where truth is rife if it can only be properly interpreted. Perhaps we require all of these methods to communicate, or perhaps life is a battle to see which will be dominant. Mr. Khoury has, here, much to say on this question.

In a rapidly changing Middle East, where borders are literally being redrawn in response to the political tornados kicked up by World War II, life is evolving far too quickly for the millions impacted by such swiftly changing realities. Out of the sands of British-controlled Palestine has erupted the Jewish state, an event which has sent out turbulent shockwaves throughout the region. In the years to come, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine will gain and lose territory, acquire and discard western masters, and adhere to or reject kings, the chaos of which will see them plunged into a modern world that bears chillingly few similarities with the reassuringly familiar past.

Dropped into this uncertainty are Meelya and mansour, a young Lebanese couple who straddle two very different generations. Married in 1946, their parents were subjects of the ottoman empire and their children will be governed by Hezzbollah, placing them at the heart of events that will transform the 20th century for the Middle East. How Meelya and Mansour will navigate both these changes and their own lives, though, will test their love and their sanity. For whereas mansour believes in the power of poetry to create unity, and even victory, out of division and tumult, Meelya, rejects this view. To her, words mean almost nothing next to the power of the vivid and jumbled dreams that have characterized her entire life. These vivid experiences are so powerful that they draw Meelya out of the real world, painting for her a continuum of past, present and future that is subject to nothing more than the laws of the imagination.

Their battle of competing views revolves around Meelya's painful pregnancy which appears, at times, to mirror that of Christ's birth. As Meelya slips deeper into her dreamworld, Mansour tries to reach down and pull her to what he considers safety. But for Meelya, the world of dreams is a world of knowledge and power, a place where she can walk with giants.

Originally published in Arabic in 2007, As Though She Were Sleeping is a challenging novel. Mr. Khoury uses Meelya's dreams to toy with time in a way that demands the reader relinquish his conventional notions of reality so that he might be drawn down into a transient world seething with non-linear events. This dreamscape, if embraced, becomes a rewarding place, a canvas upon which the author can express his lyrical notions of language and politics for which the physical world has proven to be too rigid. Such is Mr. Khoury's talent that, though this world is anathema to the structured manner in which many of us think, he succeeds in conveying both its power and its danger. For as much as we come to understand the ways in which Meelya gains wisdom from her dreaming, we also see the extent to which it drives her husband mad. Meelya is inaccessible to him, a creature whose mind might as well be located on the moon for as much as he can engage with it. This clearly results in a less than ideal partnership.

There's a kind of insanity in Meelya, a dreamy drifting from moment to moment, event to event, that has permanently unmoored her from reality. While she walks with monks and saints, gods and their crucified children, the rest of us live in a world ruled by physical laws that are as well-understood as they are unbreakable. What's more, Meelya's dreaming robs those around her from knowing her in any meaningful way. For she has withdrawn to a world that, though ti is dynamic, cannot be shared. In this, despite the shortcomings of his own preferred poetry, Mansour's means of expressing himself has much more potential for personal reward and lasting, cultural change. But then, we get the sense that Meelya could not care less. For she is content in her knowing in a way the rest of us will never be.

As Though She Were Sleeping was banned throughout much of the Middle East for some of its steamier passages. Though all such bans are ridiculous, Mr. Khoury's case is particularly so. For this is infinitely more a contemplation of knowledge and expression than it is an attempt at erotica. But then try explaining this to the narrowminded censors to whom the literary page is nothing more than a collection of inked words, some of which have the distinction of being taboo to the ignorant.

A surrealist's dream... For the rest of us, an interesting exercise, but one that requires perhaps too much effort on the part of the reader to temporarily abandon his conceptions of reality. (3/5 Stars)

Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though the claim that history is written by the victors is too glib to be entirely true -- the vanquished always have their say so long as they are not exterminated --, the triumphant certainly dominate and control history's narrative. Every great deed, every wonderful invention, every significant event, is filtered through the lens of the preeminent culture which, as its power waxes, lays claim to more and more of the virtues that once belonged to the societies it bested or even consumed. This isn't conscious plagiarism; this is the result of the dominant culture's attempt to explain and justify its primacy. After all, how else does one reach the top but through being the best?

Good fortune. For the tides of history are as fickle as they are tempestuous. A lost battle, a devastating storm, a chance encounter, could all, in their own ways, change the course of local events which ripple out to impact on broader trends which, in turn, decide the fate of our world. This is at least the contention of Mr. Ansary in his fascinating history of the world through Islamic eyes. His is a most compelling case.

Before the West was lifted out of darkness by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the printing press and the longbow, Newton and Galileo, the Islamic world thrived. Emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, Arab civilization arose to conquer and command the majority of what we now refer to as the Middle East. Organized around a faith that taught its practitioners as much about law and morality as it did about god, the Islamic world quickly flourished, producing scholars of religion, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. This earnest desire to understand drove them to recover and then preserve Roman and Greek texts then lost to a West drowning in barbarism. In might and wisdom, in numbers and in learning, they had no peer save for perhaps the Chinese of the far east.

For 300 years, the Islamic world was civilization. But then disaster struck. Off the Asian step came the Mongols, an indomitable wave of horse-mounted warriors who smashed the Islamic armies raised against them. These defeats re-opened deep wounds long festering in the body of the Islamic world, accentuating the extent to which corruption, political rivalry and decadence had divided and fractured the people who called themselves Muslims. Within 200 years,withered by misrule and misfortune, there remained but the faintest traces of this golden civilization, its peoples either co-opted or returned to the deserts, leaving behind only a legacy of literature and light to sustain the remnants while the West ponderously rose to shake the world with a succession of industrial, philosophical and technological revolutions.

Penned by an Afghan-American academic, Destiny Disrupted is an enlightening and enchanting journey through the history of Islamic civilization. From the birth of the Prophet to 9/11, Mr. Ansary describes, with loving care, 14 centuries of Islamic life. From the wonders of its golden age to the horrors of its fall, he winningly captures its virtues while carefully exhibiting the fundamental flaws which contributed to its decline and subsumption by western Europe. But as much as the author impresses with his breadth of scope and his engaging prose, the extent to which he compares the Islamic world with the West provides his account most of its highlights.

Mr. Ansary contends that, though the Islamic world possessed all of the key ingredients necessary to ignite the Industrial Revolution, centuries before the West managed this feat, it failed to capitalize on its advantages mainly because it lacked a centralized church. The author argues that it was rebellion against the authoritarian bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism that inadvertently instilled in Europeans that particular strain of individualism that catalyzed philosophical, political and economic thought in the west. Islam, meanwhile, lacking an domineering church, had no means of instilling in its own people that same freedom of the individual. Without this, it simply could not produce, educate and properly position the key innovators necessary to spark the same revolutions that would energize the western world. Though this is a long bow to draw, it remains, nonetheless, a compelling argument.

This is not an academic history. Mr. Ansary freely opines on his subject. Moreover, he injects his account with personality and anecdote, elements which raise the specter of bias. However, the clarity of his thought and the thoroughness of his account allow his forthrightness to be an asset, not a drawback. Stimulating stuff... (4/5 Stars)

House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though we are enlightened by education and defined by careers, though our spirits are elevated by art and our minds refreshed by vacation, we are rooted to the world through family. From our parents to our most distant cousins, from the current generation back through antiquity, our lineages not only shape our destinies, they swell our chests with pride. They tie us to ethics and standards that must be generationally maintained. They ground us in a world that, absent these connections, would be a merciless hurricane, a maelstrom capable of leaving us shiftless and alone. Family is the tie that binds, the thread running through all we know. This is a truth quietly celebrated in Mr. Shadid's somber memoir.

Wearied by the cruelties of war and left isolated by the dissolution of his marriage, Anthony Shadid, an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times, relocated, in 2006, to Lebanon, the land of his ancestors. Aware that his great grandfather's house has been left to decay into disrepair, a dilapidation he equates with wider Lebanon, Shadid sets about on a months-long odyssey to restore the house to its former, Ottoman glory. Warned frequently by his pessimistic neighbors that the project is both pointless and foolhardy, Shadid ignores such wisdom, intent upon a mission of rediscovery. For as new concrete is poured and gardens cleared, as debris is removed and old fixtures buffed to new glory, Shadid ventures into his family's past to retrace their arrival in America where, beginning with his grandmother, they settled in Oklahoma, opening a local market whose financial nourishment would elevate their subsequent generations to university and then to professional careers, prospects unlikely to have been realized in the unsettled Middle East.

As the project to rebuild the old house hits snag after snag, as his dream of restoring some measure of the alluring past to the troubled present fades, Shadid appears on the brink of breaking, his soul too burdened by what his eyes have seen to press on in the face of endless obstacles. But then he comes to understand the house and its culture in a new light that burns away doubt and leaves behind the same, steely resolve that sustained his immigrant grandparents through the trials of journeying the new world. The project will be completed. The past will be restored. There will be a future for all that he holds dear.

Penned with a war correspondent's quiet, clenched grace, House of Stone is a memoir as beautiful as it is tragic. Mr. Shadid animates rural Lebanon with a painter's skill, breathing life into the attitudes that govern its people even while he does his best to understand and explain the enduring pessimism that hangs over this cursed country like a dark, forbidding cloud. But as much as he succeeds in coloring the landscapes and vivifying the people, aims which grant the reader a glimpse of Lebanon's tortured soul, it's the poignancy of his mission of reclamation that elevates the piece from the mundane to the exquisite.

Every page bleeds with Mr. Shadid's sincere attempt to restore something lost. Principally, this is in the service of his family, its name and its honor. However, he swiftly dives deeper than these important but superficial drives, reaching for something far more powerful. Hope, that he can find peace, that he can begin anew, that he can have a hand in leaving behind a legacy, that he can overcome the DNA of tormented Lebanon to create something beautiful, something new that honors the old while speaking to the continuum of human life and experience. This is as wonderfully conveyed via his attempt to build the house as it is through his artistic reconstructions of his ancestors immigrant journey to America, that distant and unfamiliar land.

This is as heartwarming as it is heartaching, not only for its content, but also for the fact that Mr. Shadid's dreams will necessarily remain half-formed. For not long after completing the restoration, he would die, in the spring of 2012, having been robbed, by death, of the full appreciation of his earnest endeavor. This is tender work worthy of a first-rate journalist. (4/5 Stars)

A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts by Christiane Bird

From The week of April 23, 2012

The freedom to live as we choose, unconstrained by the tyrannical whims of the few, is humanity's deepest desire. Food may satiate our hunger and water quench our thirst, but only liberty can satisfy our souls. For notwithstanding the unproven promises of religion, we each have but one life to spend in this world of varied treasures. TO waste that gift in political bondage, forced to labor at the behest of others, is a crime against us all.

Many of us understand this truth intellectually, having had its wisdom handed down to us from the visionaries who fought for and enshrined our freedom, but we do not truly understand it. We cannot taste it for we have not had it ripped from us. No, to truly understand freedom, we must look to those who have lived and toiled beyond the protection of liberty's shadow. Who better to teach us then the Kurds, masters of living at the behest of abusive powers greater than they. Ms. Bird elucidates.

A land of mountains and deserts, tribes and rebellions, Kurdistan is home to the largest population of stateless citizens in the world and is, consequently, one of its most cursed regions. Surrounded by Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, it is beset on all sides by strife, quarrelsome nations who have, at various times, slaughtered its people, coveted its oil, suppressed its language and pilloried its culture, all in the name of self-interest. Not all of these attacks have been malevolent in nature. Some have arisen out of earnest desires to forge new national identities and modernize the region. However, though these assaults may forego the warlike depravities of other attacks, they are nonetheless destructive, tearing at the fabric of Kurdish life unto extinction.

Far from suffering these attacks meekly, the Kurds have violently resisted the efforts of their neighbors to claim their lands and steal their resources. Many of their sons and daughters have built strongholds in these mountains from which reprisals can be launched in the name of Kurdistan which, for decades now, has been nothing more than an idea, a region without a nation, a people without a home. It is into this churning sea of conflicting forces that Ms. Bird plunges her readers headlong. Over many trips and many months, she absorbs Kurdish culture, immerses herself in Kurdish life and is hosted by Kurdish people eager for their stories of love and betrayal to be heard by the broader world. Beginning with Kurdish-controlled cities which preserve the purest form of Kurdish culture, she soon travels to the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian controlled fragments of Kurdistan, documenting the various ways in which these nations have received and treated their Kurdish minorities. What emerges is a diary of 21st century Kurdish life that is, in every respect, unforgettable.

A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is a mesmerizing documentation of a people scarred by war and poisoned by tyranny. Ms. Bird, a western journalist, largely foregoes grizzly reconstructions of the various atrocities the Kurds have suffered. Instead, like a photographer of culture, she takes snapshots of the Kurdish people, allowing their tortured faces and their resilient souls to speak for themselves. Through these faces, these lives, we come to comprehend the rhythm of life in fractured Kurdistan: the burdens of the past they bear, the political challenges they face, and the fear of an uncertain future they confront. All this is made painfully and vividly clear while Ms. Bird's narrative introduces us to to the people, the culture, the language, the religion and the society of a civilization at risk of being ground to dust by the powerful, conflicting forces surrounding it.

Though A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is not precisely a history of the Kurds, it serves the same purpose. For it introduces us to a beautiful and beleaguered people who have been betrayed so many times, by so many different nations, that it's a wonder they have the will to carry on. And yet, these experts in suffering are revealed, here, to have the endurance of saints and the industriousness of builders, proving, once and for all, that, though the strong body can be broken, the strong spirit cannot be made to wither.

Exceptional work that is outshined only by the amazing souls it uncovers... (5/5 Stars)

Jerusalem by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

From The Week of November 14, 2011

Though there are numerous methods by which humans have created orderly societies, peace and stability appear to depend upon one, powerful prerequisite. There must be enough land to be fairly shared by all. For if humans have cause to fight over land, on the grounds of its scarcity or its significance, then violence and discord are inevitable. And where violence and discord reign, order cannot take root. This is the lesson that the city of Jerusalem teaches us, both through its history and its present day. It is a lesson that Mr. Sebag-Montefiore's thorough biography of this most ancient and contentious city conveys so well.

Settled some 6,000 years ago, Jerusalem is one of the oldest, continuously inhabited human settlements on Earth. After its rise to regional prominence under King David, the city was claimed by the Persians, the Macedonians, the Maccabees, the Romans (pagans and Christians both), the house of Herod, Islamic kalifs, warlords from ancient Iraq, Christian Crusaders, Saladin, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, a succession of European empires, and regional Arab factions before the mantle of its ownership was finally seized by the Jewish people in the name of a new Israel. Amidst these contested centuries, the city has been sacked and besieged, its holy sites desecrated and its peoples savaged by wars, plagues and unimaginable deprivations. At its height it was a world-renowned place of trade and commerce that housed hundreds of thousands of souls. At its ebbs, it was a ravaged ruin, a rat-infested jungle of broken buildings that was home to barely 20,000 humans, its glory a dim and forgotten memory next to the brilliance of Damascus and Baghdad.

And yet, despite the wild variations in its fortunes, Jerusalem has always been the spiritual home to three of the world's most prominent faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Its holy sites are, for these adherents, literally biblical, the places where demigods lived and died. These are the ties that have maintained the settlement for all these centuries. But of course, these are also the ties that cause it to be the center of its factiousness. For each of these three faiths have a claim upon ground that has never been shared. It has only ever been fought for and won. It seems doubtful that this will change anytime soon.

Though Jerusalem is preoccupied with creating a catalogue of the lives of the powerful leaders who have, over the millennia, claimed and ruled this holy, human city, it is, in every other respect, an informational tour de force. Mr. Sebag-Montefiore, a British historian, is thorough to the point of academic rigor in his attempt to trace Jerusalem's political lineage from its founders down to the Six Day War which, since 1967, has momentarily settled the question of Jerusalem's ownership. He is refreshingly forthright concerning the fallibility of his sources, particularly for the city's earliest years, the history of which comes down to us primarily through biblical tales. Consequently, the author wisely confines this part of the narrative to a brief reconstruction of events as we understand them. The majority of the tale is taken up with Jerusalem's more recent history, the authenticity of which can be confirmed by multiple, contemporary sources. These more modern sections are filled with both the giants of history and the wars they waged, all of which are vividly rendered by the author.

However, as successful as Jerusalem is at teaching the reader about the city's political history, it does very little to convey a sense of Jerusalem as seen through the eyes of anyone but its rulers. But for some passages concerning architectural trends through time, and but for passing references to a few of its more famous artists, the reader is negligibly educated on life in the city, at any point. History is not just a reconstruction of the successes and the failures of kings and politicians. It is a tapestry comprised of culture and politics with neither more important than the other. Jerusalem has failed to considerably deepen my understanding of the city as a whole.

This is a thorough and successful read which is well worth the 650-page commitment. Jerusalem has a fascinating and tangled history which Mr. Sebag-Montefiore has admirably conveyed. Unfortunately, the lack of cultural information prevents it from achieving the greatest heights. (4/5 Stars)

Warriors Of God by Nicholas Blanford

From The Week of October 31, 2011

Though the roots of the conflict are centuries old, for the last 60 years, the Middle East has been awash in spot fires eager to erupt into a full-blown conflagration. Ever since the founding of Israel in 1948, a region-transforming event brought about by the flight of Jewish Europeans from the deadly antisemitism of the Third Reich, the region's Arab populations have felt aggrieved not only by the Jewish state's aggressive policies, but by the unconditional support they've earned from guilty, Western nations. Hobbled by their own societal inequities and angered by Jewish intransigence, the Arab Street agitated for war with Israel, to reclaim, in the name of justice and religion, the Palestine they believed they owned. But rather than bring about glorious victories over young Israel, these engagements largely resulted in crushing defeats for Arab nations, some of which even found their lands occupied by the very Jews they were confident of destroying.

Though the reverberations of these defeats have impacted on every Arab nation in the region, none have felt its brunt more than Lebanon which has given birth to a phenomenon that promises to have a mighty impact on the 21st century. I speak of Hezzbollah, the subject of this thorough and frightening history.

Mr. Blanford, a British-born journalist who has spent decades corresponding from the Middle East, here assembles the nearly 30-year history of the world's most successful and provocative resistance movement. Vivified by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which required only nine days to reach and occupy the country's capital, Beirut, Hezzbollah, literally "party of god," has since become the region's most powerful paramilitary organization and Lebanon's mightiest institution. Financially and ideologically nourished by the Shi'a Islam brought to prominence by the 1979 revolution in Iran, Hezzbollah considers itself above the Lebanese state, operating unilaterally and without sanction within every aspect of its society.

Helmed by Hassan Nasrallah, a Shi'a cleric and Hezzbollah's patriarch, the movement, which seeks to sew the ideology of resistance to Israel into the very fabric of Lebanese culture, has been widely credited with forcing Israel to end, in 2000, its 18-year occupation of Lebanon. But not content with its territorial gains, Hezzbollah has since pressed its advantage by launching hundreds of rockets, provided by Iran via Syria, into northern Israel, terrorizing the Jewish population there and provoking a second war with Israel in 2006 which annihilated much of southern Lebanon. However, unlike every other occasion in which Israel's technological advantage has allowed it to claim victory over its opponents, Hezzbollah is widely felt to have strategically defeated Israel in this most recent conflict. For it has not only managed to repair much of the damage done by Israeli bombs, it has not only succeeded in acquiring modern weapons capable of holding their own against state-of-the-art Israeli materiel, it has mastered the art of psychological warfare by maximizing civilian casualties and by terrorizing Israeli populations and sending them to their bunkers with the mere firing of a missile. Given these advancements, not only must Hezzbollah be considered a significant evolution in resistance fighting, it must also be given the benefit of the doubt in future conflicts with Israel. For it has promised that the next engagement will not play out in war-weary Lebanon, but in the here-to-for sacrosanct territory of Israel itself.

Published in the fall of 2011, Warriors of God is an exquisitely detailed and up-to-date history of Hezzbollah as both a terrorist organization and a resistance movement. But while the reader is profoundly informed about the nature of Hezzbollah, its fundamentalist roots, its charismatic leaders, its ingenious structures and its frightening achievements, he is also educated in the anatomy of an occupation, both its destructive necessities and its inevitable outcomes. For here, with the benefit of hindsight, we are witness to Israel's foolish 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon and how its claim to such territory only fuelled existing resentments towards Israel from within Lebanon. Every wrong step, every provocative act on the part of the Jewish state only swells Hezzbollah's ranks, popularizes its ideology and deepens the divide between it and its sworn enemy. In this, the account is utterly convincing that peace and justice can never flow from occupation. There are simply too many destructive elements nourished by such conflicts.

This is a terrifying read. Mr. Blanford does nothing to dissuade the reader from the notion that all-out war in the Middle East is but a few years away. For while Hezbollah has had its individual successes and is fuelled by the ingenuity of its members and its leadership, it is only effective as a result of being sustained by Iran. If Mr. Blanford knows this, then surely Israel does as well which means that, as Hezzbollah grows more and more antagonistic towards Israel, it is only a matter of time before Israel considers it necessary to strike at Iran as a means of isolating Hezzbollah. And given that it seems likely that the United States would militarily support Israel in any conflict of this severity, there is little doubt that the next war in the Middle East, involving Israel, might well be the biggest and perhaps even the last. And at the heart of all this, Hezbollah... Exceptional work. (5/5 Stars)

After The Prophet by Lesley Hazleton

From The Week of July 24, 2011

For much of our world, history is alive, an ever-present force with the capacity to fuel both scholarship and hatred. For as much as its investigation can uncover new truths and right past wrongs, destructive grievances can also be extrapolated from its maelstrom, grievances with the power to sunder once united peoples. is an examination of one such moment in history, a moment that changed Islam forever and sowed the seeds for conflicts still being played out in the 21st century.

In early June, 632 AD, in what is now Saudi Arabia, a man was dying. After a long life in which he had risen from obscurity to found one of the world's most prominent faiths, the Prophet Muhammad was succumbing to a fever brought on by that most common of human killers, illness. Severely weakened, he attempted to communicate, to his family and loyal companions attending him, his last, earthly wishes, including the definitive word on who ought to succeed him as leader of the Islamic people. But thwarted in this endeavor by his ambitious adherents who were too afraid of the great man siding against them to hear his truth, Muhammad died with his desires shrouded in mystery. Though years would pass before the full force of this calamity could hit home, in less than a generation, the uncertainty surrounding the proper succession would tear the Islamic people apart, forever dividing them into two conflicting camps, the Sunni and the Shi'a.

Ms. Hazleton, a veteran journalist, assembles in After The Prophet a chronicle of both Muhammad's death and the events that followed it, beginning with the argument over who should succeed their prophet and ending with th fates of his descendents, with a particular focus on Aisha, his favorite wife, and Ali, his cousin and the first youth to accept Muhammad's teachings. In-between, Ms. Hazleton traces, in painstaking and tragic detail, the many spats, grudges and power struggles which lead to civil war, the martyrdom of Ali and the unbalancing of a people Muhammad worked so hard to unite. For readers, like myself, who are only passingly familiar with Islam, part 1 of Ms. Hazleton's book, covering the events surrounding the death of Muhammad, will be eminently enlightening, imbuing important, historical figures with fascinating personalities and logical motivations. In this, Aisha and Ali are the standouts, long-suffering antagonists with burdens to bear, principles to uphold and wars to reluctantly fight.

But where part 1 succeeds in laying down the foundation of the conflict in gripping detail, part 2, the story of the tangled history of the various princes, warlords and self-interested chiefs who succeeded Muhammad's family, is blurred by a haze of unfamiliar names, inexplicable deeds, and unimaginable times. If part 1 is an introductory course on Islam, part 2 feels like a fourth year class in which notes must be taken and prior principles well-remembered.

As challenging as After The Prophet's second half can be, the whole is well worth the read. If Islam was a dead religion, or a religion that did not concern itself much with its history, the dispute over who should have succeeded Muhammad would be purely an academic argument. But Islam is a living religion, a faith whose followers value its past as much as they do its present. If it is to be understood, its past must be grasped and this is, for the most part, a quality place to start. (3/5 Stars)

The Honored Dead by Joseph Braude

From The Week of July 17, 2011

We can never truly understand places culturally foreign to us. We can try, of course, but no book, no university course, no immersion scheme, can substitute for the mosaic of accumulated knowledge, behavioral, societal and cultural, which comprises nationality. But this truth should not dissuade us from the exploration of other cultures. After all, other than physical exposure, the attempt to understand something, or someone, is the most direct way of fostering tolerance and open-mindedness to new people and new ideas. And in a world suffering from a lack of tolerance, a lack of respect for other people and their beliefs, what is more valuable than an open mind? This attempt to understand empowers Mr. Braude's investigation into Morocco and its challenging streets. It's what motivates him to care about a mystery that doesn't concern him, fates that don't involve him. It is what drives him to risk alliances and friendships in a part of the world where it is dangerous to be devoid of such.It is what elevates The Honored Dead from a self-indulgent memoir into a tale of universal self-discovery.

As a consequence of recent, liberalizing reforms in Morocco, Mr. Braude, an American journalist, is allowed to experience something few Westerners have ever seen. Attached to the Casablanca police department as an observer, he is not only taken on ride-alongs, he is furnished with unprecedented access to police files and practices which, in most Arab countries, are firmly walled off from outsiders. Despite such privileges, Mr. Braude threatens both his tenuous partnership with the CPD and the friendships he's made with its officers when a simple investigation into a senseless murder of a man in a Jewish-owned warehouse provokes him to press for a truth the police refuse to acknowledge. Guided in his investigation by a man who considered the murdered man his best friend, Mr. Braude and his companion travel Morocco, delve into family history and journey into the world of Islamic magic all in the hopes of uncovering the inconvenient truth behind the killing of a man widely considered to be an innocent.

Part memoir and part mystery, Mr. Braude ably entwins his own history with his Moroccan investigation to create The Honored Dead, an exploration of Arab culture, its conflict with Judaism, its struggles towards modernization, and its inability to serve its people with a full measure of justice. Though the murder investigation is interesting enough -- many Islamic sensibilities are both revealed and offended by its execution --, Mr. Braude himself is his tale's most interesting enigma. The descendant of a Jewish community that once called Baghdad home, he is staunchly American, more than eager to aid his country's authorities in the rubbing out of terrorist activity. At the same time, he's clearly conflicted over the role he played in the dissolution of a treasured friendship with an Iraqi-American he met while at university. Consequently, he imbues the pursuit of this particular Moroccan truth with a reckless zeal that may well solve the case, but it will not repair the damage that has been done, nor restore the lost closeness he now laments. This broken friendship not only drives Mr. Braude onward in a mad pursuit of truth, it is a quietly potent metaphor for the gulf of ignorance that separates East from West, authoritarianism from democracy. And so, even though Mr. Braude is sometimes too central to his story, he's delivered, in the expose of his desires and mistakes, the portrait of a man and a world both straining for understanding, for truth and for freedom. Quality work and gripping despite its narrow scope. (3/5 Stars)

Inside The Kingdom by Robert Lacey

From The Week of June 26, 2011

All nations undergo transformations, moments of political, social and or economic enlightenment which haul them, kicking and screaming, into modernity. But while some nations have the benefit of centuries of gradual change to soften their landings, others are compelled to endure radical re-modellings that span only decades, evolutions which toss them, unprepared, into worlds they do not know. Of these nations, none can claim a recent history more spectacular than Saudi Arabia.

As recently as 1950, Saudi Arabia was a desert kingdom, a canvas of sand and stone dotted with villages and governed by tribes that lived on and worked with land that had more or less remained the same for 2,000 years. But with rise of American power and the discovery of oil in those sands, everything changed. In sixty years, thanks to in whole to the fortunes reaped from its oil, Saudi Arabia has gone from a politically unimportant backwater to a nation of 27 million souls, ruled by a hyper-rich elite who have converted much of their wealth into economic and political power. The former, they've spent on their nation's rapid and jarring modernization, raising cities out of sand dunes. The latter they've spent on consolidating their influence not only throughout the Middle East but abroad as well; after all, Saudi oil flows liberally through gas stations in the United States and China alike. How can a country re-organize itself from a rural, agricultural society to a modern, urban state in two generations?

It can't, at least not peacefully. Too many people to educate, too many people to subordinate, too many people to fit into the new hierarchy... Too much change...Beginning with Juhayman's seizing of the Grand Mosque in 1979, Mr. Lacey, a British historian, charts the shifting sands of Saudi Arabian life that have characterized its rise to prominence. He accomplishes this largely through an examination of the Saudi royal family, beginning with each king's political and economic policies before describing how those policies have impacted on everyday Saudis and the lives they struggle to lead. The picture that emerges is chaotic, a tangled web of tribal loyalties, powerful interests and religious zealousness which, together, have prevented Saudi Arabia from developing a healthy civil society.

Mr. Lacey rarely misses his mark. Though he, like every critic of the Middle East, has a tendency to draw overly general conclusions from the available evidence, he spends the majority of this chronicle laying down a solid narrative that covers the key events in recent, Saudi history and the prime movers who have participated in and shaped those events. From the chaos of the Siege of Mecca to the terror of 9-11, Mr. Lacey is informative about the cultural and political challenges the Kingdom has faced and will face in the future. But while I come away from Inside The Kingdom educated about the roadblocks that stand in the way of Saudi Arabia's liberalization, this piece offers almost nothing but a cursory description of the factional forces that fragment the kingdom into its three major regions, Mecca in the west, Riyadh in the center and the oil fields in the east. In other words, this is a Great Man history, one that concentrates on the movers and shakers, not the movements that underpin them.

Politically sharp and narratively gripping. This is good and informative work, but I will have to look elsewhere for an understanding of the Saudi Arabian people. (3/5 Stars)

Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Is there a more pernicious, human force than extremism? From enslaving minds to destroying governments, it has a whole host of virulent powers, but perhaps the most terrifying of these is its capacity to silence intellectuals who, in all their knowledge, are a danger to that special brand of illogic practiced by extremism. Reading Lolita In Tehran does many things well, but its articulation of this assault on society's educators is, by far, its most important achievement.

Born in Iran to a successful family, Ms. Nafisi was educated in America before returning, in the late 1970s, to her homeland to teach English at the University of Tehran. Not long after taking up her professorship, the Iranian revolution brought to power zealots who swept away many of the secular freedoms Iranians once enjoyed. Frustrated and offended by stricter and stricter codes of religious conduct, Ms. Nafisi quits the university when it is made clear to her that she will no longer be allowed to teach the great works of Western civilization made verboten by the new regime. Refusing to go quietly into the night, she establishes a small reading circle for some of her female students, running it out of her home under the guise of ladies who lunch. And it is this circle which forms the core of Ms. Nafisi's memoir, exposing us to the young women of revolutionary Iran, women who have had their freedoms usurped, their life choices narrowed, their futures dimmed by ignorance.

Though there are numerous self-indulgent detours into Ms. Nafisi's uncompelling personal history, the narrative is primarily driven by the fallout in the classroom of the Regime's crackdown on universities and the consequences this crackdown has on Ms. Nafisi's female students. The story creatively cuts back and forth between Ms. Nafisi's attempts to teach English literature in a university being radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists and the personal lives of her students, all of whom struggle with all they've been made to sacrifice. Their pain, at being treated as objects, not people, is acute, and it's a pain that I can well imagine applies to the whole of Iranian society which has now spent 30 years being slowly devoured by radical Islam. What will be left when the clerics are done? Will there be a civil society who knows of Nabokov and Joyce, Fitzgerald and Twain? We'll have to wait to find out.

Ms. Nafisi is a bit too taken with her own story -- the plight of her students is infinitely more interesting than her own --, but the extent to which she has captured the slow descent into chaos of a world governed by anti-intellectuals is powerful and revealing. (3/5 Stars)

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)

Dreams And Shadows by Robin Wright

From The Week of February 13, 2011

While freedom is the birthright of all intelligent beings, it is, in some parts of the world, a right rarely practiced or protected. Though there are many different superficial reasons for this most grievous oversight, there is, to my mind, only one root cause, instability. It can corrupt political systems, corrode economic practices, and destroy societal norms, all this while flowing effortlessly across national borders. After all, what are the odds that country A remains a peaceful, neutral, multicultural, economically viable state while country B, with whom it shares a border, descends into violent, chaotic, despotic conflict? Poor, to say the least. And yet this is the Middle East, a collection of re-drawn nations whose populations know only colonialism and authoritarianism, where, for the last 50 years, instability has had its AK47 pressed to the sweaty temple of intellectual and scientific enlightenment. Find peace in that...

Ms. Wright, a veteran, American journalist, has travelled to, and clearly spent a great deal of time in, the Arab world. Dreams And Shadows is as much a distillation of those many adventures as it is a political and historical primer for the region, its many states, its violent regimes, its savage politics, and its heroic dissidents. From the hama Massacre in Syria to the most recent flare-up between Israel and Lebanon, she covers, here, many of the region's key events, painting a 30 year picture of political and religious extremism and the extent to which brave souls, armed with nothing more than their minds and their courage, have tried to stanch it. Iran's zealousness, Syria's ruthlessness, Egypt's corruption, Lebanon's sadness, and Morocco's darkness all play prominent roles here, illuminating, for those of us lucky enough to know stability, what it's like to live in a world where hope can be so easily and cruelly snuffed out.

This kind of sweeping narrative can be prone to generalizations, as the author's mind, built to seek out patterns, tries to make all the pieces fit. But Ms. Wright does an admirable job of steering clear of grand pronouncements, substituting them for descriptions of the events she's seen and the meetings she's had, with the oppressed and their oppressors. I found her succinct characterization of the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war particularly revealing. The only major flaw here is the necessarily inconsistent approach Ms. Wright has taken with each of her national subjects. In Lebanon, much of the conversation is taken up with its leaders, while elsewhere the action is focused on beleaguered dissidents trying to overthrow their jailers. But I imagine this to be a largely unavoidable consequent of following the story. One can only talk to people who will talk to you... Excellent, sobering, enlightening, and especially relevant in the light of the Arab Spring. In this, it is far more prescient than dated. (4/5 Stars)