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.

When Asia was the World

When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the 'Riches of the East
© 2009 Stewart Gordon
256 pages

When Asia was the World revisits, through the lives of traveling monks, traders, and warriors,  the extraordinary vistas and cultures of greater Asia from 500 to 1500 A.D.   It is not a conventional history of Asia before the ascendancy of Europe,  but allows the reader to play the part of historical tourist, tagging along with various men traveling circuitous routes from Iran to China. Some are traders, bringing to life a robust economy that nearly covered a hemisphere,  Others are pilgrims -- Buddhist monks, traveling from China to India and back, visiting every monastery they can and soaking in wisdom -- Muslims, too, made treks to learn from courts afar. These men circulated not only spiritual insight, but secular knowledge, connecting courts across the continent.  Others are Mongolian raiders,who don't bask in civilization so much as incinerate it.  This is ideal reading for someone who has a vague interest in Asia, or in global history in general, but who doesn't want to deal with an actual history book. Here, the history is absorbed through men of zeal and ambition, willing to transverse epic mountains, forbidding deserts, lush forests, and pirate-filled sea planes to see what's beyond the horizon.

Related:
The Spice Route, John Keay
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, David Bernstein

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

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.  

Ornament of the World

Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
© 2002 Maria Rose Menocal
315 pages

        

  Ornament of the World is the story of a unique civilization in medieval Europe, one which ultimately disintegrated but left a hopeful legacy. For hundreds of years, Europe hosted a distinctly Islamic polity: Andalusia, the last stand of the Umayyads. The inheritors of Muhammad’s empire, they were driven out by a palace coup and reestablished themselves across the Mediterranean, building a glorious realm of their own.  They brought the best of an ascendant civilization and combined it with the remnants of the classical world; theirs was a world of fusion which allowed not only Muslims, but Christians and Jews to flourish and contribute as well. Ornament covers a thousand years of Spanish history, mixing literature, art, and politics to deliver with flourish the story of a lost but golden age.  Though heavily romanticized, the author’s  lovestruck tone makes it an enticing introduction to medieval Spain.

 In subject and intent, Ornament is quite similar to A Vanished World, but much tidier. It begins, for instance,  with the rise of Islam, and from there moves forward in the time-honored chronological fashion. Following the death of Muhammad, leadership of the Islamic polity fell to a series of caliphs, one of whom – Ali – was especially consequential. Under his reign, the Umayyad caliphate,  Islam expanded in leaps and bounds. Success ever breeds resentment, however and Ali found himself murdered along with much of his family. A minor relation fled to Spain and there begins the story of Andalusia. Amid the first Muslim civil war, however, the princeling didn't come alone. He and his followers found Iberia ripe for the picking,  and in a matter of time had conquered most of the peninsula.  "Woe to the vanquished!" was not the case, however, as the resident Christian and Jewish populations found themselves officially protected by the new state- - for a small consideration, of course.  Al-andalusia and its capital of Cordoba would go so resplendent that a later successor would presume to claim himself the Caliph, the princeps of Islam..  Islamic politics would be their undoing however; another faction would rebel against the reigning Abassids and make their stronghold in Tunis, just a stone’s throw from Iberia.  When the Umayyads later sought help from the north African Muslims against the resurgent Christians, their allies found their Spanish brethren much too decadent and proceeded to wreck and take over the place, Fourth Crusade style.

The loss of unity following the Umayyads did not destroy the creative culture they established, however; instead, leading city-states competed to out-do the other to restore that glory, just as after the fall of Rome states like Venice, Genoa, and Florence competed against the other. While the Italians engaged in petty wars and magnificent frescoes, the Moors engaged in petty wars and mesmerizing poetry.  Menocal has done prior work on Arabic literature, so not surprisingly language, prose, and verse receive a lot of attention.  The emphasis on literature extends to the Christians and Jews;  Hebrew adopted elements of Arabic verse and flourished in its own right. This was a period of intercultural collaboration;  in Toledo, for instance, Arabic and Jewish scholars worked on translating Aristotelian texts, which then drifted into Europe, replete with commentaries. Just as Muslim mosques and fortresses in Iberia began with Roman bones -- so did resurgent Christian powers adopt elements of Arabic architecture, even in areas where the Umayyads and their successors never reigned.  Eventually the Castille-Aragon alliance would overwhelm the predominately Moorish south, effecting the Reconquest

Ornament compares well to its sister-rival, Vanished World;  for instance, the Muslim sack of Compostela,  which appeared rather randomly in Vanished, features here as part of the Umayyads’s  Iberian downfall.The same general who leads a military coup against them also attacked the Christian shrine. This same episode also accounts for the contrasting versions of St. James – one meek and mild, the other the Muslim-slayer.  After his shrine was desecrated and his pilgrims murdered, the peaceful James returned to have his revenge. Hell hath no fury like a saint scorned!  This covers nearly a thousand years of history in a mere three hundred pages, though, and a lot of that is taken up with swooning over literature and poetry;  this is utterly enjoyable, of course, but it does meant that the political sketch is an outline at best, so this is by no means a complete story. It is a loving tribute to the life of art and philosophy that found a home in Islamic Spain, however.

Vanished World

A Vanished World: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval Spain
© 2005 Chris Lowney
320 pages

Vanished World sets medieval  Spain before the reader with the warning; we may be blessed or cursed by emulating its example. The Iberian peninsula is the very perimeter of western Europe, within a stone's throw of both the vast continent of Africa and the looming expanse of the Atlantic. Despite its apparent remoteness, Iberia was throughout the ages in the very thick of the action --  the pitch wherin civilizations clashed. In an earlier age, Rome and Carthage sparred; a thousand years later,  Visigoths and Muslims fought.  The invasion of Spain in 711 by the Umayyad caliphate made the former province of the Romans, then yet another ruin ruled by nominally Christian barbarians, into an outpost of a far larger, far more sophisticated civilization, where it enjoyed a golden age that was for Europe a preview of the Renaissance and enlightenment.  Here the gifts of the Greeks were preserved and built on; here  both Islam and Rabbinic Judaism grew in new directions.  Vanished World is a brief  and romantic history of medieval Spain, one brimming with hope that we can all just get along.

Until the triumph of Ferdinand and Isabella, who united their kingdoms and created a state commanding the peninsula, Iberia was home to a multitude of peoples and minor states. While many were drawn by commercial cross-traffic, others came to carve out kingdoms, like the Visigoths and their successors from Africa, the Umayyads. Iberia was fractured and destitute, lingering in a winter of civilization that was chased away by an eastern wind. Unlike the barely literate Goths,  the Muslim invaders were part of a vibrant, culturally rich civilization on the ascendant. Sweeping over the peninsula, they infused it with new life, creating a social order that allowed their new subjects to participate in it.  Although the calpihate would falter after the death of its leader, breaking into squabbling branches that were brushed aside by a Castillian comeback,  it reigned for several hundred years and created an environment that brought the best of human passion, creativity, and intelligence to the surface.  After an introduction which establishes an outline of Spain's political history.  most of the book is given over to sections which explore different aspects of the civilization that prevailed between the fall of the Goths and the rise of Castille.  These include chapters on the growth of science, as Muslim and Jewish scholars built upon Greek knowledge and advanced it considerably, as well as some on religious revolution; the Judeo-Muslim mystical traditions both flourished in the Iberian setting. Downey's vision for the book is made apparent in contrasting several pairs of legends. The patron saint of Spain. St. James, was remembered alternatively as either a humble and kind apostle who spread the Gospel to the furthest reaches of the continent, or as Santiago the Muslim-Slayer, who was said to have appeared and led a Christian army to victory. A similar contrast is offered by the Song of Roland, depicting Charlemagne as a Christian warrior fighting the fiendish Muslims, and the story of El Cid, who found honor and friendship among the ranks of both.   Christian and Muslim need not spar, Downey writes, offering various examples of cross-cultural pollination and episodes of historical cooperation, as when Christian and Muslim powers joined together to fight...other Muslim powers. 

Although the subject is fascinating and I wanted badly to like it, in truth the book is limited. Downey is a very casual historian,  chatty and informal.  That can work to a degree, but sometimes retards a reader's ability to take the text seriously. Assuming one is completely oblivious to intellectual life in the medieval epoch, Vanished World will be quite exciting. Personally, Spangenburg and Moser's history of science covered this ground too well for me to take much here, though I did find the bits about Sufism and Kabbalah of interest.  The history is also heavily sanitized in view of Downey's objection. It's a laudable goal, of course, and he does mention a few trifling incidents of unpleasantness, but haranguing Christians for the Crusades is hardly fair when no mention of the Battle of Tours is made.   Sixty years after the conquest of Spain by Moorish armies, the Umayyads advanced on France itself, meeting defeat scarcely 150 miles from Paris.  Humans will never cease to war with one another, though, regardless of religion; Christians may fight Muslims, but as this and countless other books demonstrate, they will happily dig into one another as well. We're a hot-blooded species given to destruction.  That considering, it's nice to review the many ways we are capable of working together, as Downey does here,  touching on science, art, medicine, and even the invention of cowboys.                

Look for a future comparison to Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. 

  

                                               

I Am Malala

I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World
© 2014 Malala Yousafzai
240 pages

     In 2012, Islamic fundamentalists shot a girl in the face for refusing to be cowed by their forceful attempt to impose regressive mores on her village. Malala Youfsayzi then became an international celebrity, honored by the leaders of nations and even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I Am Malala is her autobiography,  and like the girl, utterly earnest and encouraging. Raised in a small Pakistani village, Malala’s politically engaged father  raised her to speak her mind. She was one of her school's most diligent students, often its top-ranked. When the Taliban began moving into her area, however, that changed, and starting with the enthusiastic reaction of people to the radio preaching of a self-appointed imam who urged  a return to more puritanical mores. At first, he appealed to only the fringes, but after an earthquake leveled much of the region, it was billed as God's wrath and became the impetus for a larger following.  Like Anne Frank, she and her family are persecuted by malicious powers, her plight ignored by the Pakistani government; but also like Frank, she never gives into despair despite waking up in a strange land, her body hooked up to bizarre machines, her family utterly absent.  I Am Malala covers her young career as a political activist, first as a student simply sending anonymous briefs to the BBC, and now as a woman on the cusp of adulthood.  I Am Malala offers a glimpse into the life of a region only familar to the US offices bombing it with drones, and delivers a sense of how it feels for one's town to be taken over by armed lunacy.  This definitely of interest for those who need a sense that good still fights for itself in the world.

Sailing from Byzantium

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
© 2005 Colin Wells
368 pages           

       Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium  examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance,  Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization.  Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing  does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent's demise.  The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus.  Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East's richest provinces, and  Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack.  The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid;   having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and  as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium's. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow.  The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers,  connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It's quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in. 

The Last Patriot

The Last Terrorist

© 2008 Brad Thor

352 pages

The Last Patriot takes a modern covert-cops thriller and combines it with The DaVinci Code, though the sinister establishment being threatened by some archaeological find is not the Church of Rome, but global Islam.  The novel opens with a car bomb exploding in Paris, its target an American historian in the employ of the US president.  “President Rutledge” hopes to shake Islam at its base by revealing the Last Revelation of Muhammad, for which the prophet was supposedly assassinated.  The nature of that revelation is evidently seriously enough  that angry Muslim villains employ a US secret agent turned terrorist to kill anyone who might know about it. Unfortunately for him, Rutledge has a whole band of terrist-fightin’ secret agent men of his own, and they go ‘round and ‘round throughout the novel killing people until the final reveal.

Although I’d hoped for an exciting military or political thriller set in the mid-east, most of the action takes place in either Paris or D.C. The fantastic plot beggars belief, between the amount of clues tied up in Thomas Jefferson’s architectural work, and all of the characters seriously believing that a document changing their beliefs about the Koran would diminish global terrorism. The story climaxes at Jefferson’s privately-designed estate, where clues in its design lead to the location of the final revelation’s hiding place, National Treasure-like. The stuttering hostility toward Islam doesn’t help, with the general avowing that global Islam is the worst thing ever being occasionally disrupted by characters blandly mentioning that it’s radical Islam they hate, not Islam in general). Aside from the technology and some of the American characters, there’s not a lot of believably here: Left Behind had more credible Muslims.   I'm not entirely sure what the title even has to do with the plot; it seems a generic America vs Evil Muslims tale with some Founding Father resonance thrown in. 

The Crisis of Islam

The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
© 2001, 2003 Bernard Lewis
184 pages

Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong? examined the failure of modernity in the middle east, but did not address its role in the rise of terrorism. The Crisis of Islam complements it by focusing chiefly on the factors which have inspired violent political activity in both the mideast and against the West, activity which is typically referred to as terrorism. Lewis examines the context that the terrorists claim (Islam) and the history of western nations with the middle-eastern area.  The book reveals a myriad of factors at work, and although it isn't quite as thorough as I would have liked, it covers a great deal more than most Americans know.

Lewis starts off with a history of Islam, pointing out that for a number of centuries Islam's political empire constituted perhaps the high point of civilization on Earth. He points out the historic lack of distinction between  religion and the state in Islamic society, which is helpful for western, especially American, audiences who are used to the idea of church and state being separate and often conflicting entities. His conception of jihad seems conservative, used entirely to describe war against nonbelievers. Other sources refer to such a war as the 'lesser' jihad, or struggle -- the greater struggle being against our own weaknesses and unwise desires. He also uses the House of Islam vs. House of War dichotomy, which is something I've only seen mentioned by people who are intimidated or hostile by the mention of Islam.  The chapters on interaction between the west and the Islamic middle-east are far superior, especially in covering the tendency of strong western countries to meddle in local affairs following the Great War, when the Ottoman Empire's breakup gave Britain and France a host of new quasi-colonies called 'mandates'.  The story which emerges is of the middle-east as a failing area , one which produces impoverished and hostile young people who see modernity as having created that failure and who deeply resent the west for having created it, as well as constantly disrupting local politics at its convenience. On the latter count, at least, their grievances seem justified.  I only wish Lewis had focused on economics more: I confess to having been swayed by Albert Hourani's notion that some of the anti-western hostility has the same source as labor agitation in the west's own early industrial history.The industrialization process eventually produces an economic boon, but at a cost of environment and human welfare.

Recommended for most readers.

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

God is Not One

God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Rule the World and Why Their Differences Matter

© 2010 Stephen Prothero

400 pages

Despite the promises of modernity to drive religion out of the human mind, the New York City skyline bears witness to its continuing relevance. While religion can serve as a force for good,  it’s a master at nurturing the darker sides of human nature, and the good religions have achieved is often a testament to the moral courage of humans who have fought to push these systems of thought beyond their origins.  Some have gone so far as to say that the differences between religions are unimportant, that they are merely different paths up the same broad mountain which arrive at the same place. Stephen Prothero says different.  None of this tearing-down-the-walls-that-divide-us nonsense for Prothero, he intends to prove that religions are all rigidly disconnected boxes, and that while we may choose to shake hands with or shake fists at the fellows in the other boxes, we can only do it through tight little windows.

I looked forward to grappling with this book, largely because my own mind is so divided on the subject: while I believe that all religions were created by human beings to understand the world and perhaps to better themselves,  I also know that some religions are so defined by their aggressive assertions that they cannot easily find peace with other.  I found God is not One to be an unsatisfactory sparring partner, however, being  frustratingly simplistic, and ultimately disappointing.  In the first eight chapters, Prothero analyzes eight  of the the world’s major religion’s through  four-points:

• a problem
• a solution
• a technique
• an exemplar

He believes each of these religions (Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Taoism, Hinduism) attempts to address one of eight different problems in human nature, and offers eight fundamentally different approaches to life based on that problem.  This analysis is entirely too simplistic for the problem at hand, however. While it’s possible to identify characteristics within a religion that make them unique, those characteristics do not constitute the religion. This eight religions, eight boxes organization ignores the more fundamental similarities religions might have:  the constant cycle of life/death/rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, and the hateful split between the material and spiritual worlds that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so keen on convincing us of.

A second problem with this is one Prothero tip-toes around: although the eight religions he identifies here do have many varied differences, they are not necessarily hostile.  Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism have all existed in China together for centuries, for instance: they each have different offerings, and people happily sample beliefs and practices from each table, cafeteria-style, arriving at a worldview that meets their needs. Prothero speaks of religions ruling the world like hostile nation-states, but not all religions are as imperialistic (and therefore, conflict-prone) as the dominant forms of Christianity and Islam.  The Asian triplets point out the greatest problem with this book, Prothero’s sinister attitude about the relationship between humans and religion.  He would have us owned by religion, forced to live within that particular religion’s box. In the beginning, he snorts that attempts at interfaith dialogue which ignore the walls of differences are “disrespectful” of religion. I say poppycock. Why should we be respectful of religion and let it lie like a dusty rug? We should pick it up, bring it into the sunlight, and then beat it vigorously until all the dirt has fallen away and nothing but beauty remains. Why should we, the living, be content to breathe the dust of our ancestors?

Although Prothero’s thesis never grows legs to stand on here, the book may have some use for those interested in learning about other religions. He shows no bias toward one religion over another, though I advise nonreligious readers to steer well clear. He is bizarrely hostile toward humanists and atheists, dedicating an entire chapter to calling the ‘New Atheism’  a religion and its advocates hypocrites and plagiarists. This is stupidity, of course: religions are organized systems of beliefs, while atheism is a single belief -- and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are no more plagiarists for making the same criticisms of religious assertions that Bertrand Russell did than is the second man in the crowd who dared to say the emperor had no clothes on.

I’m ultimately disappointed with this book: while it has its uses for comparative religion readers, there are assuredly superior books out there on that subject. I daresay even The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religion or some similar work would be better. I despise the spirit that sees the maintenance of religions as more important than the good we might do by overcoming our differences.

Source

Related:

• The Evolution of God, Robert Wright
• A History of God, Karen Armstrong
• The Faith Club,  Ranya Indliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner
• The Great Transformation: the Beginnings of our Religious Traditions, Karen Armstrong

The Evolution of God

The Evolution of God
© 2009 Robert Wright
576 pages

Evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright uses the concepts of natural morality and the 'moral imagination' to  understand the growth and (arguably) increasing maturity of the three Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  He moves swiftly from primitive hunter-gatherer mysticism to Jewish monotheism and through to the rise of radical Islam in four hundred pages, engaging in a casual conversation with the reader about topics like salvation, sin, and God. In the final hundred or so pages,  Wright offers concluding thoughts and expresses hope that the three "we're so very special" religions will one day calm down and learn to work together. He believes this is possible, and even probable, because natural selection has equipped human beings with the ability to recognize  potentially productive social bonds and either improve or move beyond religion and custom to engage in healthy relationships with other people.

In Wright's view, religion developed to effect and maintain social cohesion and order. Religion grows, shrinks, and otherwise adapts to serve society's needs. It can bring tribes together for productive purposes, or unite them against a common enemy. When a society needs peace and tolerance, the invented scriptures or interpretation of existing scriptures promote goodwill: when the society 'needs' or would profit by aggression and war,  the creation and use of scriptures changes accordingly: thus,  Muhammad promotes a live-and-live-live policy when attempting to lead a mixed Arab-and Jewish community, but shouts "Kill the infidels/polytheists wherever you find them" when leading assaults on his community's enemies.

There's much of value in The Evolution of God. Those completely new to understanding religion from a natural perspective  should find it a fascinating introduction to the subject.  I have been studying and attempting to understand the growth of Judaism and Christianity for several years ago, and enjoyed the refresher. There are some ideas in here that I've not heard of --  for instance, that the biblical kingdom of Israel was formed by two unrelated tribe with similar gods, who merged their respective chief deities (Elohim and Yahweh) into one. He reveals some of the Hebrew scriptures' mythological references, and turns evaluations of Jesus on their heads by making a distinction between the 'real' Jesus and the Jesus that matters. Sure, the historical Yeshua of Nazareth may have been an apocalyptic prophet who shared his people's prejudices against non-Jews,  but the Jesus the church created -- gentle Jesus meek and mild, defender of the poor and preacher of peace -- is the one people are inspired by. That is modernity's Jesus. Religion is important for what it does for people and society -- not for its initial revelations or the record of its sayings. This approach especially helped me to understand and appreciate the rapid growth of Christianity under Paul's command, as he uses it to create a network of mutually-assisting communities across the eastern Roman empire.

At the same time, his emphasis on a given society's  use  of religion sometimes detracted from the understanding of the religion's history: there's nary a mention of outside influences. I thought it rather odd to read about the evolution of Judaism  without a single mention of Zoroastrian dualism and apocalypticism, for instance. The closest Wright comes to this  in his chapters on Philo and the Logos, but even there he maintains that the idea of the Logos, that the universe itself was embedded with ideas about how people should live,  occurred in other societies at the same time -- so general Greek influences are ignored as well.  Wright tended to make more concessions that he needed to towards religious readers, but I suspect this is to make up for the perceived hostility of  his materialistic approach.

The Evolution of God is very readable, with a fair bit to offer those new to the subject. It is limited, though, so those interested would be well-served by reading further.  I have my own recommendations, naturally:

Related/Recommended Reading:

• Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Asimov examines the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as human literature, not revealed and holy truths. I've only read the first volume but have been well-served by it.
• God's Problem, Bart Ehrman.  Though the evolution of religion isn't a theme for Ehrman in this book,  it solved a major part of the puzzle of Judaism's evolution and later spawning of Christianity for me: apocalypticism.  Ehrman's written other books of interest, but I haven't read them. 
• Reading Judas: the Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of  Christianity, Elaine Pagels and Karen King.
• The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong
• Persian Fire, Tom Holland. This won't tell you a thing about Judaism, but Holland writes on Zoroastrian concepts that migrated into the Judeo-Christian worldview following Israel's brief annexation by Babylon and Persia.

These are some of the books which have furthered my own understanding of Judaism and Christianity. 

What Went Wrong?

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle-Eastern Response
© 2003 Bernard Lewis
180 pages (adopted from lectures)

In essence, this collection of modified lectures is a brief history of modernization in the Islamic world and its aftermath. The fist three chapters focus on the Ottoman Empire's attempts to modernize in the light of its military defeats at the hands of presumed barbarians, but Lewis moves to the Islamic world as a whole in the latter half of the book. Initial attempts to modernize were limited to military arms and techniques, though later the Ottomans and other powers attempted to build western-style economies with little real success; exports remain limited to chiefly oil outside of Turkey, and according to Lewis,  Iranian and Arab businessmen prefer to invest their money in the west or in Asia.

Beyond the historical aspect, Lewis' work is at its most useful when explaining the disconnects between the ways the western world and Islam have approached ideas of tolerance, freedom, and human rights.  It's not as if these things don't exist in Islam,  Lewis explains, but they're approached from different ways. Freedom means freedom from incompetent or abusive rulers; human rights is what is 'divinely-sanctioned'.  Lewis also explains that Islam historically has lacked both an organized church and thus a distinction between matters of religion and matters of state.

Despite nearly a century of attempting to catch up, Lewis believes the Islamic world continues to fall behind: now it is no longer following behind the west, but being lapped by it and post-colonial or rebuilding powers in Asia. He describes this as a lack of answering the right questions: for too long,  Muslims concerned about their regress have asked 'who did this to us' and not 'how can we set ourselves right'.  Lewis doesn't go into any amount of detail explaining what leads to terrorism, only why the Islamic world has so far failed to utilize and benefit from modernity in the same way as Japan and similar cultures. He is not optimistic about the future of Iran and similar nations, believing them to be locked into a negative cycle of self-pity and lashing out at threatening foreigners.

Not as thorough as I would've liked, but I was expecting more emphasis on modernization and its influence on terrorism. What Went Wrong is suitable for  brief history of Turkish modernization and an explanation of intercultural tensions between the West and Islam.

Related:

• Islam, Karen Armstrong
• A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani
• Extended review, including a chapter-by-chapter recap.

A History of God

A History of God: the 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

© 1993 Karen Armstrong

460 pages

I checked this out in early 2006 but quickly lost interest after encountering the Sumerian mythology that Armstrong introduces the book with. After breaking through this, I found A History of God to be a quite readable and informative history of the three Abrahamic religions, covering their initial origins and then tracking their development through the centuries, devoting separate chapters to the religions' response to mystics and the philosophic God of the Greeks. Armstrong is interested in what the idea of God has meant for people whose culture has been partially formed by the Abrahamic faiths, although she connects the book's narrative to a greater human story by comparison and contrast to Hinduism and Buddhism. Armstrong's voice seems fair: I can imagine no objections raised against her treatment of the faiths except from ardent inerranists or anti-religionists. The book is a thorough and readable take on the intellectual, philosophical, and theological histories of two of the world's largest religions and their progenitor.

The Essential Koran

The Essential Koran -- the Heart of Islam: An Introductory Selection of Readings from the Koran

© 1994 trans. and edited by Thomas Cleary

202 pages

I was somewhat reluctant to include this as a TWATL post given its nature -- poetic verse, rather religious or not, seems as if it should be appreciated bit by bit over a long period of time rather than "consumed" all in one go -- but decided to comment on it regardless. I read it bit by bit over the course of a week, as I've done with some poetry and short story collections in the past. Although I've read a few books reading Islam, I've never read the Koran itself. It seemed appropriate that I remedy that situation.

Although the Koran is often compared to the Judeo-Christian bible, its format is very different. Rather than being a collection of many works (mostly prose), the Koran is a collection of poectic verse that -- as the stories go -- an Arab named Muhammed heard delivered from an angel and repeated for the benefit of his people, eventually converting the verse into written form and thus producing the Koran. Like most poetry, I suspect it loses a lot in translation, claims to the majesty of Arabic aside. The Essential Koran is composed of bits and pieces of the Koran, so I'm probably not getting the full effect.

The verses encourage humanity to worship God and love wisdom while promising retribution for those that do not. The religion that emerges in this is one similar to that promoted by some of the Hebrew prophets: both urge people to purify their inner life by believing only in the religion of God -- not in "man-made" beliefs like the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus or asceticism. Most of the verses in The Essential Koran either praise God or urge humans to live justly. Those who love the truth and walk in the light will see their reward in a Garden of Paradise, while those who spurn it will be punished with fire. (Middle-eastern dieties and fire...) At times it seems the eternal Fire is reserved only for the fantastically evil, those who realize what Goodness is and decide to do evil just to be spiteful -- but then there are verses that say God is blinding people to light and that these people are beyond help.

Most of the book is lost on a theistic skeptic like myself, but I could enjoy some of the aesthetic quality of the verse and the ideas behind some of them. Some of the references confused me all together, like the sura that says Rome is defeated but will emerge victorious in a few years' time. What does this mean? Why is Muhammed concerned with Rome? Overall I'm satisfied that I read this, as it serves as prime-source material for things I've heard about Islam but have never proven for myself, like Mohammad's opinions on Jesus.