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Via the ever-interesting Interfaith Nunnery, I was fascinated to read that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written a quite remarkable review of His Dark Materials, a play based on the book series by Philip Pullman.* The play is apparently quite the rage in London. If it’s half as good as the books, I can imagine why: reading them was a genuinely exciting, provocative, and fun reading experience for me, I can’t recommend them enough.

His Dark Materials is a fantasy trilogy** set in an alternate but in some respects recognizable world where a “Church” with otherwise unspecified theological leanings is cast as a ruthless, near-Orwellian ruler of England and Europe. From an early aside in the first book (The Golden Compass):

Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute. (chapter 2)

That’s by no means the only or even the most interesting aspect of Pullman’s world — my vote there would go to the daemons and the daemonless panserbjorne. But it’s an integral part of Pullman’s polemic about religion, which is skeptical to put it mildly, and hostile not to put too fine a point on it.

Williams’ review, though, is such a neat reply to Pullman that … I may re-read the series. From his conclusion:

A modern French Christian writer spoke about “purification by atheism” - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright [who adapted the books to the stage --ed.] do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don’t believe.***

It was in the course of developing this response that Williams said something that really interested me:

But what kind of a church is it that lives in perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its God?

What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety - and so with violence. [...]

What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn’t surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

An especially threadbare, embattled, vicious one might look like Al Qaeda. Williams’ question reminded me of Paul Berman’s discussion, in Terror and Liberalism, of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual forefather of Al Qaeda. Berman describes Qutb’s reaction to the ‘catastrophe’ that the Islamic Caliphate — the rule on earth by the Prophet’s successors — had been ended by the secular Turkish state. Qutb believed that this portended the worst,

“a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim countries… It is an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions, and organizations.” (Berman, ch. 4)

Cobbling together Islamic and European reactionary thought, Qutb called for a “vanguard” of the faithful, charged with waging jihad against false Muslims and outside corruption alike. And, in time, the calling to desperately defend an almighty god twisted itself into a worship of death for its own sake. Qutb, on martyrdom and jihad:

“But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life…

There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.” (Berman, ch. 4)

A philosophy like this would be tailor-made for self-appointed prophets with a taste for blood and divinely based power. Enter, years later, Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and their authority via ever-greater acts of terror as jihad.

Christianity could of course be equally murderous when it considered itself threatened. Consider, for instance, the fate of the Cathars, a Christian sect in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Catharism was brutally repressed by Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian Crusade and the beginnings of the Inquisition. At Beziers alone, at least 20,000 were massacred, Cathars and Catholics alike. (When the fate of the non-Cathar inhabitants was protested, the attending papal legate famously said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”)

These kinds of examples might serve as the nucleus of a counterpoint for Mr. Pullman: one may wish religion were about Faith and Morality, but in practice it often turns out to be about Authority instead — and Authority “on a mission from God” to boot.

Pullman’s books are about more than that: protecting childhood, the (desirability of an) afterlife, and what might be called the virtues of materialism are all themes. The trilogy’s title comes from Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Chaos Umpire sits,
And by decision more imbroiles the fray
By which he Reigns: next him high Arbiter
Chance governs all. Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage …****

Mr. Pullman and the Archbishop had a public discussion of His Dark Materials on Monday. I’m with Sister Andrea: that’s a discussion I’d have loved to attend.

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* As “Sister Andrea” writes, there are spoilers in the review — all but inevitable, given the reviewer — so handle with care.
** The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
*** Judging by his speech of a week earlier, Williams means Olivier Clement, a French Eastern Orthodox theologian. The idea of “atheism as purification” can also be traced to Simone Weil (via Naked Writing). According to some, Weil’s beliefs and death echo those of the Cathars.
**** (Whoa, heavy! Couldn’t resist. — ed.) Via “His Dark Materials [an unofficial fansite]“

PS: I’d be remiss in not pointing out Michael Chabon’s review of “His Dark Materials” in the New York Review of Books, and Gary Farber’s interesting discussion of same. Gary also mentions the Archbishop’s review, and was also impressed with Williams. I also should say that for detailed, knowledgeable discussion of Sayyid Qutb, you should visit Bill Allison’s Ideofact blog.

UPDATE, 5/2: More, based on the transcript of the Pullman-Williams conversation.

I regret that I’m about to end a very enjoyable reading experience. Tomorrow, after pausing for a couple of days after finishing “The Hundred Days,” I’ll begin Blue at the Mizzen, the 20th and final book in Patrick O’Brian’s magnum opus about the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars.

I’d started the series several years ago, but set it aside. While otherwise unoccupied this past fall, I decided to go see “Master and Commander,” the movie by Peter Weir, and enjoyed it a lot. The movie intentionally bears little resemblance to the book, the first in the series; instead, Weir assembled a kind of collage of scenes and vignettes from several of the books, focusing of course on the naval “natural” talent Jack Aubrey and the cerebral, tough ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin.

It’s hard to explain what is so captivating about these books, even for someone like me who knows little to nothing about ships, nautical lore, and so forth — a little more than before, but still not all that much. Part of the answer is the genre itself. I’m indebted to Washington Post contributor and Patrick O’Brian fan Ken Ringle for this quote, from Master and Commander:

‘For a philosopher, a student of human nature, what could be better?’ says Stephen of naval life. ‘The subjects of his inquiry shut up together, unable to escape his gaze, their passions heightened by the dangers of war, the hazards of their calling, their isolation from women and their curious but uniform diet. And by the glow of patriotic fervor… A ship must be a most instructive theater for an inquiring mind.’

But the books are more than a seafaring epic. O’Brian, who died in 2000 at the age of 85, was an excellent writer and no mean social historian, giving life to both officers on deck and sailors in the rigging. The stories’ narratives change pace frequently, so that a shipwreck or an engagement with some French privateer is imminent at the end of one chapter, only to be reported by a letter home or a formal report to the Admiralty in the next, or even ignored altogether for a disconcerting page or two.

The language is a joy all its own. “Give you joy of it” was the British way of saying “congratulations” in those days, and it’s such a nice thing to say I may try it out myself sometime soon. Maturin’s habit of using “sure” as a dry, droll “yes, yes” comment — “sure it’s the great ship of the world” — is a reliable pleasure as well.

One of the main satisfactions of these stories is experiencing the friendship of the different, complementary personalities of Aubrey and Maturin. It may be that this is one of the main paths to succeeding with extended narratives, so that we have Spock and Kirk, Holmes and Watson, Maturin and Aubrey.

Yet for all that I’m a devoted Star Trek viewer and Sherlock Holmes reader, O’Brian’s accomplishment is deeper, because the two are more completely realized characters. They’re friends, yet they can be surprised by eachother. In The Commodore, Maturin overhears Aubrey playing his violin alone for once, and realizes his friend is a better musician than he is:

Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging on the inarticulate.

‘My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,’ observed Maturin, ‘but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world; but I wish his music were happier.’

According to Smithsonian Magazine contributor Cutler Durkee, Aubrey is recognizably based on the British naval legend Thomas Cochrane, who, like Aubrey, had a string of naval victories to his credit, was jailed for unwitting participation in a stock market scam, and continued his career after the Napoleonic wars by aiding South American countries in their bids for independence from Spain.

The Napoleonic wars have been called England’s “Troy Tale.” That could mean a long war replete with heroism, but also one seemingly remote from today’s concerns. But O’Brian gave his books another key dimension, a kind of “liberal hawk” outlook of the 1800s. Napoleonic France looms as a militaristic police state tinged with fanaticism, a foe that must be worn down and defeated, and one that is very nearly too strong for the British. The background of a world historic struggle sustains the plot and lends heft and significance to what would otherwise be simple adventure stories.

But the adventure is the fun part, of course. Tall ships lean and knife through the waters; cannons roar; heavy seas pound and wash across the decks; arctic winds blow; the mission compels; prize-money beckons. You look up; it’s late, but you have to read what happens next. You may be unable to stop until you’ve set down the last book.

As it happens, I’ve been reading up on the Revolutionary War a bit. I’ve mentioned before that my little girl, Maddie, has developed a real interest in it because of a PBS cartoon series about it, “Liberty’s Kids,” so that “loyalist,” “patriot,” “Yorktown,” and “Mad Anthony Wayne” are household words here these days. Admittedly, it’s mainly just fun to say “Mad Anthony Wayne” if you’re a five year old or enjoy cracking one up.

I bought a couple of books at Mount Vernon, where George Washington’s home has been preserved. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area, the people do a nice job of involving human touches in the surroundings: high school students dressed for the part performed some of the music and dances of the era, others drilled interested kids in marching in formation or presenting arms, 18th century style. The view over the Potomac, when you get to that side of the mansion, is quietly spectacular.

When we took Maddie there, she was very interested in everything: ran from one building to the next, saw what a horse drawn carriage and spinning wheel looked like outside of a fairy tale book, pondered a smokehouse and the lack of refrigerators. She also asked a tour guide, “Was it nice of George Washington to have slaves?” The man gave a pretty good answer: no, not really, but he did free them in his will, and was the only President to do so of the nine Presidents who owned slaves — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison included.

Anyway, the books are “Washington: The Indispensable Man,” by James Flexner, and “Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution,” by A. J. Langguth. Both are engagingly written books, historical page-turners if you’re so inclined. I highly recommend both.

Flexner’s 1969 book is apparently an abridgement of a four volume history he’d written earlier. I think he telegraphs his point of view fairly in the title, and by the time I was halfway through the book, I was on board: I’ve somehow unfairly overlooked Washington. His doggedness, decency, and courage really were indispensable; we owe him a great debt. And as much for what he didn’t do as what he did: he didn’t run for a third term, he didn’t mishandle the incipient Continental Army mutiny in 1783, he didn’t summarily crush the “Whiskey Rebellion.”

Langguth is a journalism professor at USC, which may explain why “Patriots” is a snappier history book than average. Chapter 1 is “Otis: 1761-1762, Chapter 2 is “Adams: 1762-63,” and so on, each chapter isolating one person or event and building on the ones before it. The one weakness might be that it’s a bit skimpy about events south of Virginia.

One thing stands out in this narrative that had not been as clear to me as it should have: if Washington was indispensable to winning and protecting the Revolution, then Samuel Adams was just as indispensable to making the Revolution happen in the first place. I plan to spend a few Washingtons on a few Sam Adams (”Brewer. Patriot.” I just love that slogan) and drinking to both of their memories before the day is out.

Both books reminded me again what an unbelievably close thing the American Revolution was. The victories at Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown loom all the larger and sweeter for the unremitting series of setbacks that seemed to bedevil rebels facing the superpower of the day.

Up next: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon Wood.

Wiggly tooth
Another historic occasion: Maddie announced with great pride on Thursday evening that she has her first wiggly tooth. She is officially a Big Girl Now. I’m unprepared. It seems to me like it was approximately a week ago that we were giving her baths in a little plastic tub and changing her diapers. Now it’s Tooth Fairy time, she dances with uncanny grace, challenges tour guides sweetly, speaks in extended simulated French, loves history and asks great questions about it, seems to remember every detail of every book she’s ever had read to her, and is clearly the best child on the planet. And she’s still glad to see me when I come home. Yay.

In case it’s not obvious, I love her to pieces.

• Jonathan Chait suggests that Comical Saeed and Ari Fleischer have a lot in common, that Bill Clinton was the only one to get the Iraq war right and stick to his guns, and that cakewalks aren’t.
• Tim Burke describes “The authentic temptations of intervention.”
• Ken Layne defends David Letterman.
• Peter Praschl publishes a series called “Unterschiede” (”Differences”) about his recent trip to Cambodia. Extra credit points for not being about Iraq. Angelina Jolie, of all people, comes off well. (in German, in case that wasn’t obvious; installments so far: 1 2 3 4.)
• John Lloyd resigns from the New Statesman: “The left has lost the plot.” (Guardian excerpt, via Harry’s Place)
• Non-leftie Andrew Sullivan compares and contrasts assorted lefties Nicholas de Genova, Nat Hentoff, and Paul Berman.
• I join Sullivan in strongly recommending Paul Berman’s book “Terror and Liberalism.” You can get a feeling for some of Berman’s arguments in the book by reading “Resolved,” his contribution to the March 3 issue of the New Republic.
• William Saletan asserts that “the number of innocent people who are dead because we ousted Saddam is dwarfed by the number of innocent people who are dead because we didn’t.” (via Daniel Drezner)

The visits and page views are back where they ought to be — a select few reading the front page, most of the rest searching for ever odder word combinations (good luck, whoever you were). On with the update grab bag:

Mr. Katzman also sent me information about “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,” and the link you see to the right. The foundation seems to have worthy goals, and there are several interesting essays by Iraqi exiles worth a look whatever else you decide about the foundation. I encourage you to have a look.My quibbles and counter-quibbles about this:
(1) The board of directors and advisors run the gamut from “a” to “b,” as they say, with Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, Gary Bauer, Bill Kristol, and Steve Forbes on board (to their credit) — but at least Donna Brazile (Al Gore’s campaign director) and Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) among others as well. The imbalance is likely more a problem of the liberal or progressive left than anything the conservatives and neo-conservatives supporting this group have done to bias its membership. The group is avowedly non-partisan and non-ideological, and I hope it remains that way.
(2) I’m not quite clear how I’m practically supporting democracy in Iraq by posting this link or otherwise supporting the group. But I don’t have many practical alternatives, for one thing. For another, given that not everyone in the Bush administration is said to favor democratization as a goal of the war, this may be seen in part as a within-war-supporters pressure group.

Again, it’s worth a look. Democracy in Iraq is very certainly a worthy cause to promote. As some of the comments to my own pro-war post below suggest, war supporters in the United States are honor bound to do what they can for this cause, and many anti-war people don’t believe it will happen. For information on obtaining the link and joining a signup list, see Joe Katzman’s or Dean Esmay’s posts about it.

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EDITS, 2/24: added details about Science reference and newsrack reference; corrected some spelling and punctuation.

…from blogging and the whole “little green footballs” business, see below. Some of the comments made me briefly reconsider the wisdom of the comment utility. Who the hell is “zulubaby”? No, I don’t really want to know. Thanks to those who were supportive or at least made a good faith effort to understand my point of view.

So what have I been up to? Over the period of about a week last year, I cleaned up my home office, cleaned up the downstairs storage room, and threw out about 6 garbage bags full of useless trash. It felt great. Entropy has resumed a bit in the office, must do something about that. But basically, great progress on the home front. The main thing was, I finally unpacked boxes of books that had been languishing in storage since we moved a couple of years ago. It’s like getting back a part of yourself. And now I’ve got a ton of stuff to read, I sometimes buy books “speculatively” and then find something else more immediately interesting.

Lots of Christmas presents, mainly for Maddie, of course. The big hits were more Angelina Ballerina paraphernalia (tiny armchair, stroller, baby brother), some Brio wooden train stuff, and an indoor/outdoor tent to “hide” from us in with her best pal Meloney from next door. Plenty of books, too; most notably “The Red Balloon” from Maddie’s Oma and a classic by Chris Van Allsburg, “Jumanji,” from next door

I enjoyed and am enjoying a couple of great DVD series courtesy of HBO. First, “Band of Brothers“, the Spielberg/Hanks production of the Stephen Ambrose history of the Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.* Well worth your time if you haven’t seen it yet; I won’t be against a second look sometime. The first episode, “Currahee”, named after a notorious mountain the soldiers had to run up at the Georgia facility where they trained, seems like a slow start, but it’s good history, and bears fruit in later episodes. The acting, writing, and directing (by different directors) were generally quite good (especially Wahlberg and the guy who played Winters), and even casting David Schwimmer as the reviled, insecure, ineffectual (American) captain Sobel was something of a stroke of cruel genius by the producers. The real stars, of course, were the real soldiers, who were interviewed without attribution prior to the first episodes, and whose names were revealed in the final episode, a straightforward thing to do, but a throat-catching effect all the same by the time you’ve seen a glimpse of what they went through. The company fought on D-Day, in the ensuing Normandy hedgerow campaign, in Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, in Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, and on into Germany (where they liberated a concentration camp).

The other series, of course, is the justly celebrated “The Sopranos”. I’m about to finish the first season. Wow. Darkly funny, great acting, from sidekicks like Louie or cousin Moltisano to wife Carmela or Tony’s mother. And good acting needs and gets some very good writing here, some very acute stuff, I think. I’m obviously years behind the curve on this, but if you’re like me and too cheap to buy cable, you’ve saved some bucks you should go ahead and splurge on renting this show for a few nights. Interestingly, my wife really loves it, too; it’s a relatively rare treat for both of us to unreservedly enjoy the same movie or TV show, so that shows something or other about the show, too. Or about us.

I’ve also got a fair bit of reading in; plowed through Band of Brothers in double time after watching the series; a fine book, subject, and author. I also got through The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, after a fast start. It’s a kind of Burmese-Indian “Buddenbrooks”, a story of an extended family’s rise and fall as history and their own personalities interact; it’s also simply a fascinating look at how British colonialism worked, and its effect, intended or not, of pitting one people against the other economically and, via the Indian regiments, militarily. The book seems strongest early on; the description of the teak forestry, with elephants, camps, and monsoon torrents bearing huge logs down mountainsides is riveting. I may be insufficiently sensitive, but one thing that bothered me is that the book somehow fails to make the case that colonialism was so very bad for the protagonists, who mainly flourish, prosper, and drive (lovingly described) classic cars and motorboats through the Indian, Burmese and Malaysian countrysides. This wouldn’t be a big criticism, except that the issue of colonialism is the main and frequent concern of several of the book’s heroes. Yet characters like the Indian soldier Arjun, who joins a World War II mutiny against the British, seem to fail to articulate their grievance adequately even to themselves or to the reader.

I was completely bowled over, on the other hand, by Paradise Alley, by Kenneth Baker. It’s an incredible account of the New York draft riots of 1863, through the eyes of several fictitious characters depicted in episodes from that riot, conducted principally by Irish immigrants against blacks and police, and put down by a Union regiment, many themselves Irish, sent north from the ruins of Gettysburg. There are also chapters where protagonists recall the Great Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, which drove so many Irish to this country. It makes clear what a mind-shaking holocaust that was for its survivors. It’s not an excuse or an explanation for what happened in 1863, but it’s certainly necessary background. The way New York firemen were essentially gangs and political action clubs with a veneer of public service was also new to me; to judge from the book, fire companies were sometimes more interested in competing with eachother than in putting out fires. I can’t do the book justice here; it succeeds both as history and as a novel that is a testament to the forgotten poor and working class people of that time. I suppose one difference with “Glass Palace” is that it is more focused and less epic. Another, of course, may be that it’s about my part of the world and not somewhere else. So don’t overlook “The Glass Palace” on my account.

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*Someday I’ll learn how the American military numbers things; I’m sure I’ve never heard of a “39th” or “98th” Airborne Division, or anything but the 82nd and 101st. And I’m willing to bet a small sum there weren’t 505 other parachute infantry regiments.

Via the German le sofa blog: a web site called Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. What is it? It starts out as an aerial photo of Manhattan. You can drill down to closeups of neighborhoods — and links to stories or story collections appear as red dots over the buildings they’re connected to. The stories are often about someone’s job at the building, in a kind of “Studs Terkel with GIS” survey of New York’s working world that is fascinating to surf around in. The writing isn’t confined to that, though; there are also links to essays and photoessays (e.g., “Defacing Britney: A Look at New York’s Newest Folk Art”) as well, some by well known writers, others not. One of the coolest things about the site: “Tell Mr. Beller A Story.” And yes, there is a link to “Stories from the World Trade Center,” that I’ll make you find yourself. Another great feature: if you use the sidebar story list, every story has a link at the top that centers the map frame on the location involved. One other note: bandwidth helps.

The stories are being anthologized in “Before & After: Stories from New York.” The blurb explains:

This anthology of stories from Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood was in production in August, 2001. Then everything changed. And so this book now has two covers, two halves, one before and one after. Each section has thirty stories, including work from Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Meghan Daum, Phillip Lopate, Sam Lipsyte, Vince Passaro, and Luc Sante.

You can order the book via the site. Sofa blogger Peter Praschl also links to an interesting New York Times review of the book and site. From the review:

Scott Rettberg, founder of the Electronic Literature Organization, said the linear progression of a printed collection reflects its editor’s artistic decisions. But online, he said: “Readers expect they will be able to make navigational decisions and form their own compositions from the available material. The music of print is more classical than the improvisational jazz of electronic writing.”

Well, the improvisational jazz of some electronic writing. You can count on more of a comb-and-tissue-paper variety of electronic writing around here.

James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly has identified a book worth having a look at: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, by Walter Mead. In what has already proven to be an interesting discussion (”Policies of Power”), Fallows and Mead explore the idea that the United States may be among the best practitioners of great power foreign policy in history, for the very reason it has sometimes been assumed to be the worst: its democratic, “unsteady” foreign policy. From Fallows’ introduction:

Essentially it begins with the claim that everyone has the wrong idea about how the U.S. makes foreign policy—journalists and politicians, historians and diplomats, foreigners and good wholesome American citizens. Virtually all of them, as you present it, make the mistake of thinking that the United States is bad at foreign policy. [...]

But the main surprising point you make, it seems to me, is that far from being the buffoon of the diplomatic world, the United States is actually its wily champion. We stumble and bumble around—and somehow we end up being the one that keeps getting its way, whose culture keeps getting exported, whose power seems only to grow.

From Mead’s reply:

My argument is that democracies do better than expected … because the national policy that emerges from the clash of interests and ambitions within at least some democratic states over time and on the average gives a better reflection of the true national interest than policies made by small, isolated elites who inevitably often mistake their own class or economic interest for the general interest of the country.

Mead identifies several competing schools of thought in American foreign policy (”Wilsonian”, “Jacksonian”, etc.) each of which is briefly in the ascendant before being overtaken by events and newly elected administrations. The book looks interesting, and the discussion is free. Both seem worth reading.

I’ve been struggling with a pretty negative view of Islam lately, to put it mildly. I wondered how hard it could be to unequivocally denounce flying planeloads of people into skyscrapers, to forego “yes, but”-U.S.-bashing while body parts were (are!) still being pulled from the smoking ruins in New York.

So I’ve been bookmarking various and sundry links to a kind of public “Favorite Places” site that I’ve imaginatively called “Islam“. Obviously, this is a very subjective and incomplete survey of web resources about Islam; it’s one I will add to from time to time. I’ve tried to incorporate instances of “honest Muslim” writing (honest by my lights), and more general articles about the relationships, twisted or otherwise, between Islam, Al Qaeda, and the Arab political world. The “Favorite Places” site is maintained by a very nice, useful free service, Backflip.com. You may want to use it for your own “bookmarks”.

Some conclusions, lame though they may be:

1. “Islam” covers a lot of territory
2. there are many Muslims who are not satisfied with Islam in general or with its fundamentalist movements (Wahhabism, Khomeini Shi’ism, etc.) in particular
3. that said, such Muslims may not exactly be the opinion leaders and trendsetters of their Islamic generation

After browsing around for a while at various bookstores and online, I decided to get In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam, by Milton Viorst, who writes frequently for The New Yorker. He decided to write a sequel to an earlier book about Arab nationalism, Sandcastles, that instead focused on the current relationship of Islam itself to Arab politics. He visited leading seminaries, religious universities, and intellectuals throughout the Arab world, from Egypt to Iran to Saudi Arabia to France(!) to research the book. From the first chapter, “Through the Damascus Gate”:

Arab culture [is deeply attached] to a heritage that has been transmitted largely intact over countless generations … [while] Westerners [are more ready to] subject their practices to constant review, experimentation, modification… I would argue that this difference, in large part, explains why the West is rich and the Arab world poor [...]

…The West’s focus on Middle East terrorism is much too narrow. Terrorism is a serious problem, one that requires constant vigilance. But terrorism is a symptom of ailments that the social lens must be widened to include… Terrorism is the cry of a society in disarray, a society which acknowledges that it has lost its bearings. [...]

…[Modernist Muslims have] been targeted for attack not just by a secular state but by orthodox and fundamentalist Muslims. In the struggle for who rules Islam, the modernists are underdogs. Islamic history teaches us that the odds heavily favor traditionalist beliefs.

Thus, Chapter 2 is titled “The Murder of Farag Foda.” Farag Foda was an Egyptian Muslim dissenter who was assassinated in 1992 by members of “Gama’a Islamiyaa”, a terrorist organization committed to suppressing heresy and establishing an Islamic state. Foda’s crime: taking on Islamic scholars at a Cairo book fair to argue that Islam would actually be better served by not becoming part of the state, that the rashidun era immediately after Mohammed’s death could not have been as idyllic as Islamic orthodoxy proclaims (3 of 4 of his closest apostles were murdered), that Egyptian Christians (Copts) deserved the protection of the state, and other heretical notions.

Doctrine, Heal Thyself by Jacob Weisberg nails it: the Powell Doctrine is all about optional wars like Viet Nam, and not about unavoidable ones like this one. I am distressed that a common-sense understanding of what the American people want is not at all a part of Powell’s calculations.

I am reminded frequently of a book I read this summer, “The Soul of Battle.” In it, author Victor Davis Hanson essentially argues that true citizen armies and generals who know how to use them can defeat just about anything. The examples are Epaminondas, Sherman, Patton and their armies.

This review, “Laying Down Arms”, in the Wilson Quarterly by Andrew Bacevich, fairly lays out the objections to Hanson’s examples and analysis, but still concludes: “Disguised as a work of scholarship, The Soul of Battle is in fact a timely and bracing polemic. Its true purpose is to indict the democracies of our own day, the United States foremost among them, for fabricating a new military tradition that is paltry, mean spirited, timorous–and explicitly designed not to engage the passions of the people. Victor Davis Hanson summons those sharing his faith in democracy to restore the connection between that faith and our military policies, so that the purposes for which democratic nations employ power and the way they fight reflect the will of the people. For citizens of the democracy that has arrogated to itself the role of world’s only superpower, that message demands thoughtful consideration.”

The times are different, as is the enemy, but I would still be very interested in learning Mr. Hanson’s take on current events.