The Arabian Nights

Tales from the Arabian Nights

“If you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely, little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:

Tales from The Arabian Nights proved an interesting challenge, because most collections of them in English are only selections, and their contents are highly variable. The first  set I started didn't mention Aladdin or Sinbad, the two stories which have the most name recognition in the west.  My reading of the Arabian nights was thus divided between two volumes, the respective translators being Hussein Hadaway and Edward William Lane.

The Arabian nights open with the framing story of two brother-kings in Persia and India visiting one another and discovering that both of their wives are cheating on them.  After retreating into the country to think things over,  they spy a demon who keeps his human wife locked in a box buried in the desert in an effort to keep her faithful,  only to have his efforts spoiled by her finding other men to sleep with  anyway. The brothers sleep with her before lamenting the unfaithfulness of womankind, and return to their respective realms, where one resolves to never keep a wife. Instead, each day he marries a virgin, sleeps with her, and then kills her after the fact. This goes on for quite some time until his vizier's daughter, Shahrahzad,  volunteers herself for marriage with a plan in mind.  Using her extensive knowledge of literature and poetry,  on her wedding night she begins telling a story that so ensnares the mind of her husband that he begs her to continue, and night after night puts the thought  of killing her away until he can hear the end.

The tales of the Arabian nights are not one long story with many chapters like War and Peace; instead, one story will unfold to have many stories inside it, or a character introduced in one story will then be followed in another story, ensnaring the reader in a multitude of threads.  They're replete with magic, of course; demons are as common as cattle, but I suspect the translation of that particular word  is awkward because the demons are not necessarily servants of a great evil power. The first one we meet is just a fellow burying his bride in a glass box in the middle of the wilderness, nothing diabolical there.  In the first collection I read, once the caliph Harun al-Rashid shows up in a story, most of the stories that follow involve his court.  (al-Rashid threatens his vizier Jafar with death every time they discover something untoward going on in the kingdom. Not exactly the happy little man from Disney's Aladdin.)  There are a lot of surprises here: Aladdin is set in China, of all places, but I suppose he could have been one of China's distant western minorities, like a Muslim  Uyghur.  Some of the stories are also far more salacious than I would have expected, given the image of Islam as straitlaced, but these stories emerge from popular culture which eludes heavy state censorship by its oral nature.

The Arabian Nights will probably rank among my favorite, or at least the most memorable, books in this Classics Club challenge.  The stories are rich in odd scenarios and characters, like the chance meeting of three one-eyed dervishes, or the discovery that the colorful fish in a pond introduced in one story are actually the citizens of a town which was cursed, and the stories-within-stories trick gets amusing, almost like a running joke. Of course each dervish, characters in a story, has to tell how they got there, and one of them has another story inside that story -- Shahrazad's ability to weave all these together is amazing.

Related:
The Canterbury Tales, G. Chaucer

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11
© 2006 Lawrence Wright
480 pages

"[...] we're told that they were zealots, fueled by religious fervor...religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any  ******* sense? " - David Letterman,  first show post-attack. 9/17/2001

Despite the efforts of Sunday School teachers who wanted to convey the fact that the end of the world was imminent, I didn't pay a great deal of attention to foreign affairs in middle school. One of those teachers dedicated a wall in her classroom not to Bible verses and theology, but to ominous news stories hinting at the imminent coming of the Endtimes.  Most prominent on the board and in my memory was a large article on the USS Cole bombing in 2000, organized by the same people who would later attack New York. After that 9/11, that seemingly random attack made more sense in context, and in Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower, the Cole bombing has a prominent place. Looming Tower is a history of al-Quaeda, of the ideological background of bin laden and his followers, as well as a chronicle of their activities. Although bin Laden did not create the jihadist fervor popularly known as Islamism, Wright contends that bin  Laden was the indispensable figure behind the movement, organizing smaller groups into an international force and financing it with his dead father's fortunes.

Westerners may find it easy to dismiss terrorists as the dregs of society, casting blame on their woes and failures on the easy target of the west. Far from being uneducated rubes, however, many of the key members of al-Queda and its related organizations were members of their society's elite: they were born into wealth and privilege, and (excepting bin Laden) spent considerable time in the west.  The intellectual progenitor of Islamism, as we might term the virulently anti-western ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam which  has been sweeping the middle east in increasingly strong waves since the mid-20th century,  actually lived in small-town America during the 1950s. There,  after being initially impressed by its wealth, he (Sayyid Qutb) grew contemptuous of America, regarding it as decadent and materialist.Qutb's writings, made more attractive by his death as a prisoner back im Egypt,  remain relevant for consideration today -- for while many jihadists are directly motivated by contempt of the West's creation of Israel, and DC's continuing support of it,    they also have a fundamental contempt for western ideals -- Christianity included, which one describes as too idealistic.  These jihadists were fundamentally opposed to western thought -- capitalism, communism, etc -- because of its materialistic basis, and despite their backgrounds in medicine or engineering rejected the scientific worldview as inadequate. Bin Laden never traveled westward, but rather east; it was in Afghanistan that the pious business prince grew to think of himself as a leader of men and after he was repelled from the Sudan he would retreat to the very same cave-structure he carved out during the Afghan war. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden met men who would be his future allies in destruction, and it was there that he establish training camps for his plans of violence on his targets.

The Looming Tower is not a history of 9/11; itself : coverage of the day  is largely limited here to the death of John O'Neill, a colorful agent-in-charge of the FBI who had been doggedly hunting al-Queda operatives before his retirement in 2001. He chose to steer into his golden years by taking a post as chief of security for the World Trade Center, and a month later he perished there while leading people to safety.  Despite the fact that the CIA was also tracking al-Quaeda operatives,  internal security measures and concerns over jurisdiction stymied the information-sharing that might have led to O'Neill realizing  there were targets constituting an active threat within the US. Most of the subject material covers leading Egyptian and Arabian figures who would build jihadist movements in their countries, attempting to achieve takeovers in Egypt and the Sudan, and fighting abroad in Afghanistan.  The history indicates that Osama's war on the United States despite its status as an ally of the anti-Soviet jihadist, was not caused by DC's later support of secular dictators against more religious populaces.. Instead, Osama's attitude toward the US had already hardened, and he wanted to take the fight to the United States as soon as the USSR had withdrawn: having defeated one demonic superpower through prayer (and American-made Stinger missiles), he wanted to destroy the other.   Then, a new caliphate could sring into being and regain its medieval might --and more.

DC is now seventeen years into a war that Osama bin laden wanted it to fight.  That war has led to a succession of others, multiplying  with now grim predictability, creating other threats like ISIS. While that gangster-state  has now been reduced to a brand name for murder,  it is a safe bet that some other  threat will arise from the region.  Today DC is currently supplying al-quaeda in Syria, recalling the days when DC armed jihadists fighting the Soviets, only to find their "allies" were only weapon to turn said weapons against DC when the Soviet threat was passed. DC is also funding and supplying the Saudi enterprise of systematically destroying Yemen, in full knowledge of the fact that the Saudis are a leading sponsor of terrorism and its subjects constituted the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.  DC has learned nothing, it seems,  and is seemingly content to waste lives and resources until the heath death of the universe. (Sources linked above include The New York Times, The American Conservative,  The Huffington Post,  and the Cato Institute. Reality is not partisan.)

Baghdad without a Map

Baghdad without a Map and Other Adventures in Arabia
© 1992 Tony Horowitz
285 pages

So your wife is on extended assignment in Cairo, and you’re a freelance journalist without a regular gig. What do you do? Why not wander around northern Africa, the Arab world, and Iran whenever an opportunity presents itself – chasing stories, even when they led you into dark mountains where grenades and AKs are cheaper than a week’s worth of the local narcotic? Baghdad without a Map presents anecdotes from Tony Horwitz’s time spent in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and Iran, mixing comedy and tragedy.

Because Horwitz is chasing stories -- a refugee crisis in Sudan, for instance, or the still-simmering conflict between Iraq and Iran on the border -- he is often exposed to misery and danger. He still finds humor in the chaos of Cairo's streets, the chanciness of Egyptian-Sudanese air travel, or the loopiness of Yemense men after a goodly amount of qat-chewing. Horowitz attempts to learn about local cultures and politics as he can on the ground, conversing with people in his rough Arabic, chewing qat, or playing soccer. Although much of the middle east has changed drastically since the 1980s – the invasion of Iraq and the Arab spring just in the last ten years, these snapshots of life in the middle east are worth taking a look at for readers with any human interest in the region.

Inside the Kingdom

Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
432 pages
© 2009 Robert Lacey

When I first began paying attention to politics, the cozy relationship between Saudi Arabia and the DC power-caste  confused me to no end. The Saudi government aided  and advanced Islamic radicalism, its nationals composed the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers, and yet the Bushes treated them like they were old friends from Rotary.  Karen Elliot's On Saudi Arabia opened my eyes to the schizophrenic relationship the Saudi family has with Islamic fundamentalism, and Inside the Kingdom elaborates on that still further, and sheds light on why they and those in DC often walk hand in hand.

Inside the Kingdom considers the schizophrenic relationship the house of Saud maintains with hard-line Islam, using the author's many years living in Saudi Arabia and his contacts inside.  In the early 1980s, Lacey wrote a history of the house of Saud that was promptly barred by the monarchy; Inside the Kingdom is a sequel to that work.   The story begins with Juhayman, or "Angryface",  a terrorist who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and turned it into the source of a siege. Angryface and his supporters claimed to have the Messiah in their ranks, come to punish the Saudis for their western decadence.   Although the Saudis reclaimed the Mosque quickly enough, the 'guardians' of the holy cities of Islam had lost considerable face. You don't see the Swiss Guard letting crazy Jesuits turn the Vatican into arenas for firefights. (They have to be elected pope first.) With the example of the Shah before them, the Saudi family responded to the threat of religious violence by becoming the sort of Saudi Arabia that Angryface wanted them to be: a puritanical state.

Lacey indicates that for the Sauds, religious extremism is a matter of having the tiger by the tail.  The Sauds are Jibrils-come-lately, monarch-wise: they only established power in the 1930s, and need the religious establishment to sanction them and  impart legitimacy. That means maintaining an Islamic state that fundamentalists like the Wahhabis approve of,  with morality being policed not only by the civil law enforcement but by religious cops as well. But enthusiasts don't settle for backdroom deals, tit for tat: they want the Saudi government to support the Cause totally, and if the Saudis don't play ball explosions will follow.  And explosions did follow, in 2003, after radicals of bin laden's ilk decided to punish the Saudis for their American partnership by attacking several compounds in Riyadh.   The Saudis in response are pushing back against the domestic influence of radical groups, even though they still promote them from abroad: they are also deepening their bench of support by allowing democratic reform.

As far as the American-Saudi relationship goes, the two states are partially united through common enemies.  They worked together during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to funnel supplies to bands of mujaheddin who later became terror cells under the likes of bin Laden, and this alliance was aided by a mutual loathing of Iran, or rather the Islamic Republic thereof. As the Saudis and Iranian mullahs are the standard-bearers for the Sunni and Shiite schools respectively, their competition infused ethnic-cultural rivalry with holy war. The biggest fly in the ointment has been Israel, which the United States unflaggingly supports and which the Saudis detest. Still,  the two continue to make common cause together, crying over the defeat of ISIS-backed rebels in Syria and mourning the  'fall' of Aleppo to Assad and his allies as if the Nazis are rolling into Paris.  Although the president-elect hasn't had loving words for the Saudis, his words for the Iranians have been harsher, and he has privately invested in Saudi-land  since starting his campaign. Business as usual will presumably continue.  Indeed, the "dopey prince" who started a,,er, twitter war with the president-elect has evidently made nice with him.

Inside the Kingdom strikes me as useful for starting to understand one of DC's weirder allies.

In God's Path

In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
© 2015 Robert Hoyland
303 pages

A Roman author referred to the Roman and Persian empires as the two eyes of the world -- but they didn't see the Arabs coming. In the span of a hundred years, a people from the desert wastes between Egypt and Mesopotamia had traveled from Spain to the Indus, bringing together a diversity of nations under one banner and laying waste to empires. History texts usually present a map of expansion as the sudden creation and explosive growth of Islam, but Hoyland argues that's premature.  Instead, he examines the Arab conquests as...the Arab conquests, in which Islam is first the means of an alliance between Arab tribes that allows them to sack two ailing realms, and then is the means of forging their own empire that transcended tribal bounds.  Instead of merely attributing the Arab spring into empire as one motivated by religious zeal, Hoyland examines the Arabs as actors on the historic stage, and dwells on their political skill.

The result is a history that overturns elementary assumptions.  For instance, conquest and conversion were two completely different processes: even a province absolutely integral to the nascent Islamic civilization, Persia, was not majority-Muslim until the 14th century.  (Islamic provincial governors were by no means eager to force conversion:  non-Muslims were taxed by the government.) By preserving the structure of the societies they were conquering -- relying on Christian and Persian scribes, civil officers, etc to retain their roles --  and offering completely secular benefits for joining the Arabs on their globetrotting campaigns, what began as a local city-state quickened into a global phenomenon.  Eventually, the religion of the Arabs, who had become the ruling class, would become the religion of a multitude, evolving along the way. Towards the end Hoyland dips into religious history,  reflecting on how the century of war, mixed defeats and triumphs, and the assimilation of various cultures shaped it. For instance,  he views the bar against images as a way for the Arabs to distinguish themselves against the decadent empires they had supplanted, but especially against the Romans, whose Constantinople twice defeats sieges here.   While there were some brief spots in the strictly historical narrative that rivaled Numbers for being a list of names and places without story to them, Hoyland's insightful commentary more than makes for it, This is a history that illustrates not only the beginning of the Islamic world, but shows some of the shared machinery of empires in general. For a book on conquests, there's comparatively little about the actual execution of battles; for that, a source like Crawford's War of the Three Gods might prove a complement.



Related:

• War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford
• Destiny, Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary

After the Prophet

After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split 
© 2009 Lesley Hazleton
256 pages

When Muhammad lay in his deathbed, legend has it that he cried to God for pity on those who would follow him. With no sons and no explicitly ordained heir, the question of succession was left to the faithful – to the murky realm of politics. There, the man many viewed as Muhammad's biological heir, his son-in-law Ali, was repeatedly passed over, despite faithful service to the succeeding caliphs – and when, twenty years later he was finally acknowledged caliph, was assassinated. After the Prophet is the story of Ali’s plight, of his and his sons’ martyrdom, with a concluding chapter on the long-term consequences of their deaths for Islam. It is highly narrative, drawing chiefly from oral histories given written form, and its figures are storied characters. We have an old and corrupt king, degenerate sons, wicked advisers, and scheming women – all set against a family which is depicted as too noble for their own good. The result is a history of a long-running personal feuds, where drastic changes like the conquest of Persia or the development of Islamic law courts are only mentioned incidentally. This is an intimate, mythic history where emotions run close to the surface, where characters are frequently covered in blood and tears, their actions charged with cosmic importance.

In the delivery of facts I wasn’t particularly impressed with After the Prophet, but she succeeds very well in demonstrating how the emotional weight of Ali’s downfall was felt by Iranian revolutionaries, who saw in the deaths of early activists against the Shah an echo of Ali’s own defenders and their martyrdom. This success is a small part of the book, its epilogue, but it builds on the emotional drama which has been steadily growing throughout the history, and gives the story a proper finish in establishing why reading it is important in the first place, given the United States’ apparently interminable adventures around the Persian Gulf where so many Shiites are concentrated. For those who have no idea what the difference between Sunnis and Shiites is, this a mythic beginning.

Related:

• Destiny, Disrupted A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary. Also narrative history, but far more substantive. 
• Ornament of the World,  Marie Rose Menocal. While its subject is Andalusia, Islamic succession politics forms the first few chapters. 

This week: the usual suspects

Well, dear readers, it's another month! I have a serious itch for science and science fiction at the moment, so I have no less than five potential science reads stacked up now, and three potential SF books. Among the numbers...Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, and Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chromosomes.   What about science fiction? Well, there's some of H.G. Wells' less well known novels, and  perhaps something newer.

I recently finished The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam.   It is a brief but highly detailed history of the last Romano-Persian war, one in which the great powers of the classical world mauled each other.  Rome nearly perished here, because while the Persians were sweeping into Syria and Judea, tribes in the Balkans began raiding against Constantinople. Eventually the Persians would be stopped, and even subjected to raids in their heartland, and the statuo quo ante bellum stored.  No sooner had the armies retired, however, than came armies from Arabia...and by the time the ancients realized these weren't just the usual Bedouin raids, all of Persia was falling and the Romans were again stripped of most of their territory outside of Anatolia. The second half of the book is dedicated to Islam's early military victories, with abundant maps that showcase the solid maneuvering of commanders like Khalid.  The book is chiefly about combat, with some politics mixed in as the Persians weakened themselves through civil war.  I intend on reading a fair few more books about the 'middle world' later on.

Since I am in the area, I may as well mention a book I read a few weeks ago, Facing East by Frederica Mathewes-Green. recounts a year in the life of a small Orthodox mission, one created by six families that include the author's newly-minted priest of a husband. The M-Gs, as the author refers to her family later on, are both converts to the faith, and throughout this piece she reflects on the way her experience has changed in the last three years, as she and her husband begin to soak in the liturgy and live the Orthodox life more deeply. While this is not a formal introduction to Orthodoxy, or even a conversion testimonial, Mrs. M-G often provides exposition about the what and why of service. Like the faith itself, however, this tale is more experiential than epistemological. We encounter the sacraments -- Baptism, for instance -- not through lectures but through the lives of the congregants, communicated in the intimate and awe-filled style of the author. Short though it may be, Facing East provides a hint of how deep a well the Orthodox tradition is. The mission of Holy Cross may be small and relegated to renting a space that has to be evacuated every Sunday afternoon to make room for the weekday tenants, but in their religious life they are as firmly established as any of the grandest metropolitan seats or parishes across the world.    I'll probably have couple of more books about Eastern Orthodoxy as the year goes on.  For the moment, however...SCIENCE!

Destiny, Disrupted

Destiny, Disruted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
© 2009 Tamim Ansary
416 pages

When Tamim Ansary was a boy, he loved history. Specifically, he loved narrative history, the kind of drama that brought the past to life.  The problem was that the only histories he could find written in  this style in Afghanistan were written by Europeans, and as such were expressly about European history.  Being unable to find a narrative history about his own people, he decided to grow up and write one. Destiny, Disrupted is a sweeping survey of the middle east, telling the story of Islamic civilization from its own point of view. It is cavalier history, galloping through the centuries and shooting from the hip. Yet for all its breeziness, Ansary offers more insight than idle jollies. Here is the story of what became of Egypt, Babylon, and Persia, of a civilization that brought them together, shone brilliantly for a few centuries, and then fell away. But the past is never dead, as the present turmoil in Syria and Iraq makes all too plain.

The story begins, of course, in the fertile crescent, with city states that become empires. We in the west know of Egypt, Babylon, and Persia because of their connection to our own story, always included as a necessary prelude in any western civ text.  But as the western narrative moves from Greece to Rome, then Europe as a whole, the world of the middle east continued to grow in its own right.  Persia was the greatest power it ever produced, warring – in different iterations – with both Alexander and Rome. For all of its glory, however, Persia was only an antecedent to the state created by Muhammad and his successors.

The beginnings of Islamic civilization – Muhammad and the succeeding caliphs Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali – receives outsized attention not only because they were the creators, but because so much of what followed continues to look back on them. Key to Ansary’s account is that Islamic was not merely a religion, but a transformative political community that overcame not only Arab tribal differences, but racial quarrels as the expanding Muslim state captured vast portions of the multiethnic Byzantine and Persian empires. This age was to Muslims what Rome was to the west – and even more so, because it combined the moral and spiritual force of religion with the establishment of law and economic success: imagine if classical Rome and Christian Rome’s golden ages had happened at the same time,  a sudden eruption of law and charity around the Med, and that the only emperors were the Five Good Ones, started off by a figure like King Arthur or the biblical David. This was the weight the founding era held for Muslims, and which has since pressed Muslims on, looking for the restoration and aggrandizement of what once was.  There is no singular school of thoughts on how to restore it;  it has been attempted through feats of arms, like the Turks; through religious martialism, like the Taliban, or through politics, led by both strongmen and populist revolts. As conservative politics look to the golden past, and progressives look to building a golden future, Islam can encompass most visions simultaneously. 

The problem with golden ages and transcendent spells is that they always wear away. After  the assassination of Ali, things went downhill. Islam would fracture into two, then three, then a multitude of polities.  Near the turn of the first millennium,  there were three ‘caliphates’;   successors-by-assassination Abbasid, the lone-survivors of the old  Umayyad’s in Spain, and the Shi’a Fatimids in Tunisia.   Against this disunity came Frankish barbarians from the west and Mongolian barbarians from the east; the capital of golden-age Islam would be utterly ruined, millions killed, and Islam reduced to a sideline player in someone else’s story.  Even later military triumphs at the hands of the Turks, who rebuilt and advanced much of the original empire, even invading Austria, could not bring back the golden age.  The twentieth century is wrought with Islamic nations' attempts to find their way again after being dominated by the industrialized west, and Ansary's count covers revolutions in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt, along with the rise of militias and terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and Palestine.

What Ansary has achieved here is a captivating story of an empire rising in glory, stagnating, falling apart, and then struggling to find itself again. The last few chapters are on various Islamic peoples' attempts to come to grips with modernity -- needing it to catch up to the west, but disagreeing on which aspects to incorporate -- and display the kind of thoughtfulness that makes this work more valuable than just a historical survey. This is on display earlier, too, especially when writing on the role of Shi'ism, starting first as politics, taking on theological importance, and then molding Persian politics.  One section, a European recap prior to beginning the industrialized portion of the book, does give me pause.  He writes, for instance, that the Vikings took over England and thereafter became known as Normans.  Technically the Normans did descend from Vikings, but they settled in France over a hundred years before their progeny ever  entered England.   In another instance, he attributes the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy to being solely the result of Diocletian splitting the empire, and later describes Christianity as being essentially about the individual. Perhaps he's thinking of Objectivism, but I am tolerably sure Christianity involves a deity,

Aside from the chapter on Europe,  Destiny is a wonderful piece of narrative history, informative and funny. Ansary sometimes sounds as if he is writing for cowboys, what with referring to people as "folks" and to disturbances as "ruckuses".  It has an odd humor about it, like when he refers to the Mongolian treatment of a ruling family: they didn't want to shed royal blood, he writes, it wasn't their way.  They wrapped the royals in curtains and them kicked them to death, instead.  Moral crisis solved!  

Although this slightly predates the Arabic spring and the rise of ISIS, both only affirm this book's relevance. For an insight into the middle east, it seems an unmatched introduction.

Related:

• On Saudi Arabia, Karen Elliot
• Ornament of the World; Vanished World, both on the Umayyads in Spain
• The Lost History of Christianity, Phillip Jenkins. Another history of the 'middle world'.
• What Went Wrong? '  The Crisis of Islam; Bernard Lewis

This week at the library: sheikhs, airplanes, and VW vans

This past Thursday, some friends drove me three hours into the woods, dropped me off in the midst of some 70 strangers, and left me there. They called it "Cursillo", and it was a spiritual retreat which I liked enormously more than I would have ever predicted.  It helped that no electronic devices of any kind were allowed, so I enjoyed four days of conversations uninterrupted by phones ringing or people gazing at their gadgets.  But that's where I've been -- physically, all last weekend, and mentally, most of this week.

Before I left, I read On Saudi Arabia by Karen Elliot House, an exploration of Saudi Arabia's culture, history, and political atmosphere. The nation is one worth learning about: home to the world's largest petroleum and natural gas reserves, and a hotbed of religious violence which is simultaneously cozy with the United States despite being abusively backward in most respects. The Saudi Arabia that House unveils is one rife with contradictions and tensions, many of which are sourced in the Saudi royal family's machinations to maintain control. They constantly strengthen and attack the warring factions inside the realm for their own advantage:  supporting and promoting Wahhabism across the world, for instance, but then swiftly attacking its adherents if their actions hurt the king or his standing in the world.  Although the Saudi family would like to  be more traditionalist, not only to pacify the swelling ranks of sectarian crazies, but to increase its own power, it is forced by reality to make changes -- to allow more opportunities for women, for instance, and be more open to criticism. The Internet is a djinn in a bottle, that undermines the complete authority the Saudi  family and religious leaders once had.  Saudi Arabia is bound to change, but it's in for a troublesome future.  There's a great line in The Dark Knight Rises -- "Victory has defeated you!" --  Saudi Arabia exemplifies the idea. It is a nation utterly ruined by its prosperity:  the rulers are corrupt, the people are spoiled (not working, not wanting to do anything useful, but eager to rage against the kingdom for not giving them more), and the economy is based entirely on oil, the production of which in Saudi Arabia may have already peaked. On Saudi Arabia is definitely worth looking at if you have an interest in global affairs and politics.

I also read Alain de Botton's A Week at the Airport, inspired by his living in a hotel attached to Heathrow Airport, where he spent his days and evenings watching people as they set forth on globetrotting adventures, or returned home from the same. Although my interest in transportation might have piqued my interest in this book, its authorship made reading it inevitable. de Botton enthralls me, finding philosophical meaning in seemingly everything. I would not be surprised to learn he had once stood in the midst of a downpour, contemplating his umbrella. He makes the mundane sublime. Witness his shopping approach in an airport bookstore:

"I explained -- with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport -- that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.
Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead."

In A Week at the Airport's scant 100-odd pages,  de Botton muses on travel, the meaning of airport food, the inevitable expectation of arriving passengers that someone will be there waiting for them, the poetry of airline food menus, our faith in technology, other miscellany. de Botton fascinates, and the photography is stirring.

Earlier this past week, I also read Through Painted Deserts, the story of of two men's journey together from Texas to Oregon in a VW bus, in which they descend into the Grand Canyon and ruminate on the Meaning of It All under the stars. I've read Miller before; he penned  Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, which left me feeling conflicted. As much as I liked Miller's conversational tone and mellow thoughtfulness, I cringed there as he continued to hit himself over the head with dogma. One of the more intriguing episodes mentioned there, his living in the woods for a few weeks,  is explored in Through Painted Deserts in more detail.  The trip takes place earlier in his life, when Miller was still a young man trying to find himself -- and he finds, on the road, that possessions and social status and all that are like, lame, man.  Through Painted Deserts alternates between low-key ramblings on life and intense summations of belief as Miller gets into simple living, mystic musings centered on the natural world, and confessions of love when he and his road-buddy aren't fixing the van and enjoying the kindness of strangers.  I found it all rather endearing. A related work would be Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.

The Age of Faith

The Age of Faith
© 1980 Will Durant
1200 pages

After centuries of economic decay, political corruption, and relentless outside attack, the glory of Rome finally surrendered to the tides of history some four centuries into the common era. The western empire gave way to a multitude of states ruled by those virile newcomers, a litany of Germanic tribes -- Franks, Normans, Angles, Saxons, Goths -- while in the east,  the classical world was maintained by the Byzantine empire, though more Greek than Roman. What unity remained was to be found in religion, in the Church: having formerly been integrated into the old Roman order, maintained its echo -- but it struggled for power with the many new kings, and even its unity would eventually be fractured. Across the Bosporus, Rome's old enemy Persia stirred -- and further south, in the windswept dunes of Arabia, a man named Muhammad was destined to create a new world power and religion, one which would war with and yet help revive western civilization. Such was the medieval epoch, and in this thousand-year history Durant tells the magnificent story of Europe's formative years.

Durant begins with the death-rattle of Rome and throws a spotlight on Byzantium before moving into the middle east. Although giving Persia and Egypt their time in the sun, it is the rise of Islam which dominates the early portions of the book -- Islam, which fundamentally altered the balance of power around the Mediterranean and  preserved much of the classical knowledge that Christian Europe happily tossed into the flames. After a time spent on medieval Jewry -- which, following the destruction of Herod's Temple, united around the Talmud -- Durant then moves to Europe which claims the bulk of the book aside from occasional check-ups on Byzantium. As with his other works, this is comprehensive history, tracking the growth of not just politics but of art, science, and religion. From where I sit, The Age of Faith is the best in the series so far.

It's been over a year since I read from the Story of Civilization series, and in that time I've forgotten how masterful an author Durant is, especially when reflecting and evaluating on the lessons our history has to offer humanity. The book is a hefty read, but the size is appropriate, allowing Durant to reflect on a multitude of cultures and ideas. His scope is impressive. The political histories and cultural treatments are exciting enough, but after musing on the vagaries of currency exchange and enthusiastically guiding the reader through the transformation of architecture from Romanesque to Gothic and the growth of literature and music,  he sits down with the reader -- perhaps under the shade of one of those awe-inspiring cathedrals which rose in the 13th century -- and ruminates on philosophy and religion, mulling over the different approaches Christians took to their faith. Some fled the world, others engaged it:  mystics held to dogma, while rationalists like Abelard dared to make reason the master of belief.  This book is a positive banquet of the human experience, and I relished dining on it day after day.

Although the medieval period is scorned as an era of darkness between the lights of classical civilization and the Renaissance,  the picture which emerges here makes that a view impossible to maintain. Though the newly empowered Christianity did do irreparable damage to the human experience, destroying "pagan" art and literature, Europe itself recovered -- and did so not by restoring Rome, but by claiming greatness in its own merits. Technology advanced, as did science -- slowly and painfully. While science had to overcome hostility by the clergy,  the medieval Europeans were at least interested in it, far more than the Romans. The Age of Faith bears witness to how much present-day Europe owes to its ridiculed ancestors -- those ancestors who created the universities, who conquered wilderness and marsh and turned them into civilization, who built towns from nothing and filled them with majestic structures which stand today, an enduring legacy. Then too are the fascinating human stories -- love affairs like Peter and Heloise,  philosopher-kings like Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, and  philosophers and scientists in both Christianity and Islam who defied orthodoxy.

Although it took me several tries to tackle this book, I'm heartily glad I did. This is definitely one worth reading.

Related:

• Anything by medieval historians Frances and Joseph Gies, but especially Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. 
• Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire, Isaac Asimov
• Islam, Karen Armstrong

A History of the Arab Peoples

A History of the Arab Peoples

© 1991 Albert Hourani

565 pages, including appendices, maps, notes, and index.

I picked this up (with both hands) to add historical context for my reading of The Essential Koran and to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of Arab history, which are as vast as the sands of the Arabian desert. Hourani's History is an expansive work, covering Arab history from the arrival of Muhammed to the late 1980s. The work is general history, with seperate sections within a chapter covering political, social, and economic change. There is a wealth of information here, although that comes at a price: some sections, particularly political history after the first part of the book, feel rushed. Sixty pages after the Ottoman Empire rises, it is the sick man of Europe and the Young Turks are attempting to seize control. Although it is readable, I think the book better serves as a reference than a popular history read, especially given the way Hourani divides the book -- most notably, his pause from the general political history of the first part of the book to deliver several chapters on the geography of the Arab world and life in its cities and countrysides.