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.)

The Lost History of Christianity

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- And How It Died
© 2008 Philip Jenkins
315 pages

For the first millennium of the church's history, Europe was less Christendom than a dismissed backwater. The heart of the faith was its fount in the middle east, where it saturated the landscape and spread through two empires across the vast expanse of Eurasia. Within five hundred years of Christianity's millennial birthday, however, its reach had vanished, lost in political upheaval and newly arrived competition. Though advertising itself as a history of the global church,   Lost History is principally about religious transformation  in the middle east, with Christianity as its case model. 

There is immediate intrigue in Jenkins' history merely for the fact that his primary subjects are unrecognizable to most as Christian.  Around the Mediterranean,  Rome -- in the person of the emperor -- maintained a faith common to all.  Achieving and enforcing orthodoxy was the reason Constantine urged on the Council of Nicaea. Outside the empire, however,  Christianity grew wild, running bramble-like clear to Asia.  Aside from stray missionaries from the Latin and Greek church,  most of the Christians covered here belonged to the Nestorian church,  which retained an orthodox-like hierarchy outside the authority of  the Greco-Roman sphere, with hundreds of metropolitans and bishops. How much of "Christianity" really survives the trek to Asia is a question Jenkins does not pursue, though the mention of a "second Jesus" buried in India allows a lot of room for doubt.   The Nestrian branch found a particularly cozy home in the Persian realm, safe from Orthodux rebuke, but the African church would vanish almost overnight, save for the impressively resilient Copts. 

The rise of Islam set the stage for the middle-eastern church's downfall, but it was not strictly a matter of religious competition.  Jenkins records Islam and Christianity meshing at first; considering the  power of Arian-like sects which effectively denied the divinity of Jesus,  they shared much more common ground than not. (So much so that medieval personalities denounced Muhammad not as a false prophet, but as a schismatic!) The golden age of  Islam was built on such ground,  flourishing through  the communities of Christian Syrian scribes and researchers.As Islam grew in self-confidence, however, and especially after it began brawling with outside powers, the  Christians within its midst were viewed as suspect. When the Black Death reared its head for the first time, a wave of persecution followed --  Christians playing the part of scapegoat that was assigned to Jews in Europe. When new powers arrived on the scene, like the Mongols and Turks, they frequently inaugurated a new era of religious oppression; the Crusades were a response  to Turkish abuses, not the nigh half-century old occupation of Jerusalem by Islamic forces.  (Interestingly, the Mongols who destroyed the high water mark of golden-age Islam, Baghdad, first persecuted  Islam and then became its champions, persecuting Christians.) Political stress turned into religious persecution again and again, a theme that runs  clear to the 20th century, when an on-the-ropes Turkey decided to rid itself of minorities with suspect loyalties. The Armenian genocide was the result.  Early Christian activity in China and Japan perished after upsurges in nationalism, as well.

This history of religious transformation in the middle east is then used by Jenkins to examine the life of religions in general, their 'struggle to survive'.  Though Christianity and Islam were rivals, they wore off on one another:  the Eastern Orthodox church's iconclastic period (that ghastly preview of Puritanism) marks Islamic influence, and mosques modeled themselves on the architecture of churches. Such architectural borrowing went the other way in Spain, where rebuilding churches incorporated elements of Islamic design  into their structure.  Even after Christianity vanished from an area, it left its mark: in rural Turkey, for instance, parents continued to have their children baptized to ensure the blessing of God.  Jenkins  speculates on various reasons regions thrive or perish amid competition; he notes that the church in Egypt became part of the culture, while in other parts of Africa it merely existed as outposts, like Roman military encampments that disappeared when the Romans left. Those churches were sustained from without, rather than from within. Faiths can also hedge their bets by expanding;  when Christianity virtually perished in the middle east, it continued to flourish in Europe; even as it fades in Europe, it grows again in Africa.

All this fairly interesting, though the book has certain frustrations. Belief, for Jenkins, is a moot point;  Nestorian doctrine or what Jacobites practiced, none of this matters. All the reader is really given is politics and labels; there were people here, they called themselves Christians, and then they were killed.  Jenkins has a peculiar understanding of Christianity, announcing to the reader that understanding the early church is impossible because Christianity was driven from its home region.  Since when is Christianity like Temple Judaism or Islam, fixated on a certain patch of earth?  What is revealed is how unimaginative humans are at creating ways to persecute one another:  Just as Christians were made to wear patches identifying them as an underclass and forced to dismount at the approach of a Muslim, so in the 20th century German Jews were made to wear patches and blacks had to vacate the sidewalk at the approach of a white.  One wonders how ubiquitous these shaming behaviors are -- did the Japanese practice them in China, for instance? The Lost History of Christianity is certainly relevant, given the ongoing slaughter of innocents at the hands of ISIS. It is a fascinating history of the middle east's religious evolution,  though of limited use for truly learning about the ancient church outside of Rome and Constantinople.

The Egyptians

The Egyptians
© 1997 Barbara Watterson
368 pages

"We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus, and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us. " (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage) 

The Egyptians surveys the entire course of Egyptian history, from ancient settlements to the 1990s, in a mere 300 pages. Were this not ambitious enough, Watterson does not limit herself to mere politics, but includes separate sections on religion, architecture, law, and economy.  The approach is reminiscent of Will Durant's symphonic history. Pyramid-like, The Egyptians is bottom-heavy:   two-thirds of the book is devoted to the ancients, with the Roman, Christian, Islamic, and modern periods sharing the last third together. The scale is immense, as it has been Egypt's fortune or misfortune to be an combatant or an object of interest to nearly every great power around the Mediterranean. Egypt's longevity is such that she has been conquered by two wholly different Persias, an epoch apart.  In the beginning Egypt was star of her own story, an insular union of two kingdoms fixed on the Nile; after outside invasion by the Hyksos, Egypt overcame her conquerors and became an empire in her own right. The land of the Nile would go the way of all empires, however, falling to Persia, then the Macedonians and their successors -- Rome, Constantinople, the caliphate, and Turkey. Through history Egypt has also been the plaything of other empires, like the French and British. Even Hitler attempted conquest, while trying to rescue Italian pretensions of a resurrected Rome.  Aside from a brief interlude during the Islamic civil wars, Egypt had to wait until the 20th century to be ruled by her own people again. Despite the generations of new reigning powers and the trauma they inflicted --  Ptolemies are utterly horrifying in their abuse, what with one king marrying his sister, then his niece, then murdering his own child and sending the body to his sister--wife to taunt her --  Egypt endures. Given the chaos of Egypt in recent years, such resilience is a hopeful sign.  

Before the Throne

Before the Throne: A Modern Arabic Novel
© 1982 Naguib Mafouz, trans. 2008 Raymond Stock
128 pages

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the souls of the dead were weighed before the gods. In Before the Throne, the dead pharaohs, generals, leaders, and dictator-presidents of Egypt process before the heavenly court, where the great lord of their ancestors, Osiris, sits waiting to judge them.  Even as Egypt is conquered and her people forget the gods, Osiris and his divine family maintain a watchful eye on the Land of the Nile, whose people are theirs.  Originally written in Arabic in the 1980s,   Before the Throne is a history of an ancient people, who have endured much but have finally regained independence, told through a fantastical trial.

Some sixty men and women are brought before Osiris's throne, and at first their judgments follow a fairly predictable formula:  Thoth, the court reporter, offers a brief recap of the individual's life, followed by the defendant asserting his merits. Osiris is rarely impressed, cross-examining to the point of grilling his mortal subject, while his sister-wife Isis plays the part of public defender, offering grounds for mercy. Most of the time the subject in question is allowed -- if grudgingly -- admittance to glory, while some are cast into purgatory and a rare few into Hell itself.  As more pharaohs pass muster, however, they become active spectators to successive trials; great pharaohs bemoan their descendants' stupidity in losing hard-won gains, or exult in their successors' steadfast defense of Egypt's people against a multitude of greater empires, fighting to their last.  The ranks of the judged include noble pharaohs and revolutionaries alike, and they bicker with one another and the defendants. Akhenaten, for instance, noted for turning away from Egyptian mythology in favor of a new monotheism, is written as  single-minded religious fanatic who is profoundly unhappy with every leader who follows until he sees in the rise of Islam the fulfillment of his own vision.  After the Persian conquest, when Egyptians endure many centuries of foreign rule,  individuals who fought for Egypt as Egypt are singled for scrutiny; the gods acknowledge limits to their sovereignty, as they begin wishing leaders success in their Christian and Islamic trials.  They are Egypt's gods, even if Egypt has become the domain of another  deity.

Translated from the Arabic,  this is a most curious book. There is virtually no awkwardness in the translation, although each rulers' time is so short that few have personality. The few who do (Akhenaten ) gain it only by complaining in every trial, least until Osiris demands that they behave. The fact that Mahfouz is writing for a predominately Muslim audience while wanting to connect to the gods of Egypt's past reveals itself in the complete lack of concern on the god's part about Akhenaten's revelation, and the fact that they acknowledge their children have become the wards of the Abrahamic faiths.  Judging by the book's conclusion, in which some of the major subjects implore Egyptians to learn the lessons of their lives -- lessons like the importance of justice, of fighting for Egypt as a thing itself distinct  from the Arab people or from global Islam, of revolution as a progressive force to realize the nation's potential --  Magfouz wrote to offer encouragement in a time when Egypt was struggling to find its place in the "modern" middle east, finally governing itself again and trying to contend against powers like the United States as unrest was sweeping the middle east. The book's published translation so soon after the Arab spring, in which again the land was given with chaos, is a most appropriate season for looking back at the leaders of the past, both noble monarchs and revolutionary leaders of the people, and examining where they failed and where they prospered.

Raiders of the Nile

 Raiders of the Nile

© 2014 Steven Saylor

352 pages

  If fortune favors the foolish, young Gordianus of Rome must be foolish indeed. On his 22^nd birthday, he lavishly adorns his slave-turned-love-interest, Bethesda, only to see her kidnapped when she is mistaken for a rich man’s companion.  The kidnappers, a notorious gang of thieves, cutthroats, and miscellaneous scoundrels intending to hold her for ransom, operate out of “The Cuckoo’s Nest”, hidden somewhere amid the Nile Delta.  To rescue his love from abuse and execution, Gordianus must track down outlaws even the king of Egypt is quailed by Soon wanted for murder and navigating the backside of a country on the verge of civil war, Gordianus is forced into trusting strangers at his peril. Although the young main character will later be wise and street-savvy, here he’s giving his real name to barkeeps at mysterious tarverns and accepting drinks from smiling strangers.  Such things generally lead to death, enslavement, or other misfortune in novels, but Gordianus lives a charmed life.  The book opens with him taking part in a grave robbery (the sacking of Alexander the Great’s tomb) , in a splash of action that introduces a mood that remains throughout. While most of Saylor’s novels are political-legal mysteries, Raiders of the Lost Nile is thoroughly a light historical action-adventure novel with a twist at the end. It’s highly speculative, of course, but enjoyable.

dirt

dirt: the erosion of civilizations
© 2007 Peter R. Montgomery
295 pages

            Civilizations rise or crumble on the soundness of their dirt, says David Montgomery. The life of a people is tied to the life of its soil, in its ability to manage it well. In dirt: the erosion of civilizations he delivers a history of societal collapses. Humanity is not a species known for moderation, and the pages of history are checkered with fallen empires whose demand for food has strangled the golden goose. After opening with a few chapters on science (beginning with Charles Darwin’s discovery that worms are responsible for reducing organic matter to humus) that explain why soil works the way it does,  subsequent chapters trace human agriculture and soil management from Egypt to modern times.  It is largely a history of failure, as great empires and minor chiefdoms alike exhaust their ground – from Rome to Easter Island.  We have not fared better in our age of scientific and technological mastery, either, as the Dust Bowl proved and as the rapidly diminishing returns of the Green Revolution bear out. Ultimately, Montgomery writes, the story of soil demonstrates that there are limits to growth and ambition; we must learn to adapt our agricultural approaches to the land that is ours, not force one convenient style of farming on every place we discover.   dirt is fascinating if a bit esoteric.

 

A History of the World in Six Glasses

A History of the World in Six Glasses
© 2006 Tom Standage
311 pages

A toast to human enterprise! Pick your poison -- beer, wine, rum, tea, coffee, or Coca-Cola. Three are alcoholic, three are caffienated: all were the stuff of empires, and the story of those empires is one Tom Standage is intent on telling. He begins with beer and wine in Mesopotamia and Egypt and moves to wine in Greece and Rome. The focus then shifts to Europe and the rum-fueled Age of Discovery that saw European nations expand across the world and remake it in their image. While distilled spirits ran the high seas, the intellectual minds of Europe stayed keen with coffee from Arabia. British and American imperialism are charted through Asian tea and Coca-Cola, respectively.

The result is light popular history that succeeds based on the author's lively tone and the perspective, which takes the lofty subject of World History and brings it down to the tavern table, supplying readers with both interesting tales about their beverage of choice as well as a greater appreciation for the role those drinks played in world history; some of the connections Standage reveals surprised even me. The importance of each drink varies; some are material, like the beer which was tied to agriculture, the basis of society, and the tea which drove British foreign policy and led to the opium wars. In the case of wine and coffee, the relevance is more ethereal: Standage champions wine-wet symposiums as an instrument of Greek excellence.  The section on Coca-Cola is an odd duck, the only one to mention a brand name. Perhaps this is because Coca-Cola succeeded like no other brand,  but it still sits oddly, and its chapters almost read like history with product placement. Standage is delightful to read, but his narrative isn't quite as thorough as I might have liked.There's no mention given to Coca-Cola's connection to the spread of fast food restaurants, for instance, though I had no idea how instrumental the Second World War was to its success.

Light, but fun; I'll probably be trying Standage's similar work, An Edible History of Humanity.


Related:
The Coffee Trader, David Liss
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, Wayne Curtis

Salt

Salt: A World History
© 2003 Mark Kurlansky
498 pages

Last Autumn, my doctor advised me to start watching the amount of salt in my diet, and so I did. That this was a concern surprised me: I was never one to add salt to my meals. When I began examining nutritional value labels, however, I realized I didn't need to: salt positively abounded. It was in seemingly everything, and my entire diet changed. What my doctor did for my diet, Mark Kurlansky has done for my appreciation of world history: opened my eyes to the absolute ubiquity of salt.

Although I knew salt was and remains important as a preservative -- that's the reason it appears in so much supermarket food --  Kurlansky's account impressed me. Were it not for salt's ability to keep food from spoiling, civilization might not even exist, for salt-preserved food allows civilizations to weather periods of drought and famine, and frees some populations from having to be in the immediate vicinity of agricultural areas. This is especially true of the civilizations which have depended on fish stocks as meat;  salt allowed fleets of fishing ships to journey far from their native lands, staying on the open seas for months at a time before returning with their bounty. Such is salt's importance and ubiquity -- not only preventing foodstuffs from spoiling, but being used in processed foods like garum, butter, and cheese -- that taxes on it have provided the financial basis of some empires, like the Chinese, and badly-considered salt taxes have led to the failure of governments. The trade in salt and salted goods has been the engine of commerce throughout history, notably in the Renaissance period. Its long history and consistent vitality have allowed salt to make its mark on the landscape (towns were often sited in places where a saltworks might be founded, and place names still reflect old names for salt) and our tongues;  'salary' comes from the Roman use of salt as payment. Judging from Kurkansky's narrative, salt was as important to Elizabethan England as oil is to the modern world.

Though similar in spirit to Coal: A Human History, Salt isn't quite as cohesive. If Coal was a novel, Salt is a collection of short stories about a central character, arranged chronologically.  Kurlansky's individial chapters spotlight salt's importance in a given point in history -- to the Egyptians, in embalming; to the Baltic seafaring nations, as the basis of their fishing industry -- but can be read perfectly well on their own, not being tied together with a tight theme. This doesn't matter in the least to start with, but after industrialism the text is more scattered. Salt becomes less importance as other preserving methods (refrigeration and canning) rise to prominence,  although this happens at the same time that the advance of science is allowing humans to understand what salt truly is.  Considering that salt was once rare and immensely valuable, and is now so common that we must be conscience about avoiding too much of it and our diets, I am left with the question of why.  One assumes better processing technology allowed for efficient salt production, or that the new science allowed us to find salt with greater ease, but Salt doesn't cover this. The ending chapters rather trail off, but this is one weak point in an otherwise fascinating book. Kurlansky has written other novels in this theme, including one on cod (not surprising given the amount of fish-related information here), and I may give them a go in the future. This is a solid read about salt's preeminence in the preindustrial world, even if it is a bit weak thereafter.