Islam in the book review NY Times

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 9:46 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Manji-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Soldiers of Allah
By IRSHAD MANJI

ARGUING THE JUST WAR IN ISLAM

By John Kelsay.

263 pp. Harvard University Press. $24.95.

Before the Iraq invasion, a young imam offered some chilling advice to Muslims at the University of Toronto: if they could not fight the jihad against America with their souls or their sons, they should fight with their money. The Muslim Students Association told campus authorities that the imam did not represent the true spirit of Islam. With that, the case was closed.

“Arguing the Just War in Islam” re-opens such debates. John Kelsay, a professor of religion at Florida State University, shows that today’s freelance fatwa-hurlers rarely capture the best of Islamic thought, but are not wholly divorced from it either. Their pronouncements attempt to pass for “Shariah reasoning,” a tradition of reconciling the Koran’s passages and the Prophet Muhammad’s examples to changing times.

For Muslim militants, however, the times do not change. Because Islam is humanity’s “natural religion,” evolution ended in the seventh century. That means the Islam of 1,400 years ago must be true everywhere and forever. “The militant vision,” Kelsay observes, “is one in which premodern precedents are not so much interpreted as applied.” No wonder a 20-something imam in the cosmopolitan West can feel utterly entitled to champion values straight out of tribal Arabia.

To his credit, Kelsay refuses to whitewash the role of religion in fostering the violence he discusses. “Those who wish to argue that Islam has nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11 or with the tactics of Iraqi ‘insurgents’ will find no comfort here,” he warns early on.

Yet his analysis also respects the nuances of Shariah reasoning. Kelsay appreciates Islamic history and delves into detail — though it is often tedious — about how theologians, jurists and dissidents decided what constitutes a just war. Like their Christian counterparts, Muslims have asked and asked again: When may battle be waged? Can noncombatants ever be targets? How much force is proportional? Does negotiation take precedence over a quick and easy victory?

Kelsay could have brought these questions to life had he given us something — anything — about the personalities of the questioners and not merely the process they followed. Stick with him, though. By forensically dissecting the development of Shariah reasoning he illuminates the situation we now face, in which classical Islamic scholars are trumped by bloodthirsty bandits who pose as thinkers.

Osama bin Laden is hardly the first of them. Consider the assassins of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who made peace with Israel in 1979. His murderers’ manifesto tried to justify Sadat’s killing with Shariah reasoning. Their case was weak — and they knew it. So they turned themselves into tabloid terrorists, exploiting emotion, inflating language and sensationalizing their target’s crime.

In short, Kelsay points out, the thugs resorted to “emergency reasoning.” According to their fevered testimonial about Sadat, “the enemy now ‘lives right in the middle’ of Islamic territory.” Emergency reasoning jettisons the basics of justice along with logic. The charter of Hamas tells slaves they may fight Zionists without their masters’ permission — thereby accepting bondage in Islam even while preaching liberation from oppressors.

By contrast, traditional Shariah reasoning is sober enough to cut both ways. Take the just-war criterion of protecting innocents. One mainstream Muslim scholar has acknowledged that, in Kelsay’s words, a child’s death may be “foreseeable but unavoidable, as when an enemy’s military resources are deployed in the midst of a civilian population. ... Soldiers whose actions take place under such conditions are excused from the guilt associated with unjust killing.” That ruling would let Israeli defense forces off the hook for collateral damage in their 2006 war in Lebanon, since Hezbollah deliberately operated in residential Beirut.

To get out of embarrassing pickles like this, the most populist interpreters of just war in Islam go for broke. The televangelist Yusuf al-Qaradhawi is one example. Skirting both tradition and reason, he intones that “necessity makes the forbidden things permitted.” The “forbidden” includes suicide, conveniently redefined as martyrdom. Deep Shariah reasoning takes another tabloid turn.

Kelsay proves that we can understand the shifting rationales behind Islamist violence without excusing that violence. But his generosity also leads him, prematurely, to proclaim Shariah reasoning an “open practice.” Were this true, we Muslims would have already had our liberal reformation. As Kelsay himself notes, unconventional thinkers in Islam pay heavy tolls, from aborted careers to prolonged prison terms to outright execution. An open practice? From the author’s lips to the Almighty’s ears.

Kelsay would retort that mass movements like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami were founded by ordinary folk, a schoolteacher and a journalist respectively. Each of them seemingly supported the democratizing of interpretation. After all, they benefited from it.

But their campaigns did not democratize Shariah reasoning at all. As puritan movements, they further restricted who could participate in shaping Islam. Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood closed down bookstores and other dens of free thought. The Jamaat-i-Islami declared a minority Muslim sect inauthentic. To this day, the Islamic world’s only Nobel laureate in science, a member of the banned sect, cannot be buried with proper religious rites in his home country, Pakistan.

Nor can moderate Muslims be counted on to rescue Shariah reasoning from militants. The sheik of Al Azhar University in Cairo, widely regarded as the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam, never directly challenged the manifesto of Sadat’s assassins. Kelsay rightly wonders, “Why not insist that militants like bin Laden or al-Zawahiri cease their advocacy of military operations, or that they confine themselves to making the case for reform through normal political channels?”

He provides a fascinating answer: moderates can share key premises with militants. The moderates whom Kelsay has studied “do not in fact dissent from the militant judgment that current political arrangements are illegitimate.” Which is not to say they have sought real democracy. Some moderates agree with militants that “democracy implies a kind of moral equivalence between Islam and other perspectives. And such a situation is dangerous, not only for the standing of the Muslim community, but for the moral life of humankind.”

The hope rests with “Muslim democrats” who will pluck the Koran and the Prophet out of a tribal time warp. Kelsay focuses on Muslims in America, recognizing three male scholars whose work ranges from online consultations about the future of Shariah to arguments for harmonizing Islam with women’s equality and freedom of conscience. He then urges the West to prosecute its war on terror by demonstrating rather than defying democracy. Doing so will help Muslim democrats get heard within their communities — a necessity for all of us, Kelsay suggests, because these Muslims might be the only people who can rehabilitate democracy’s appeal after the serial hypocrisies practiced under its banner by Washington, among others.

It is a provocative conclusion, but an incomplete one. Muslim democrats will also have to confront Koranic passages that give militants an escape hatch. The most famous verse tells believers that slaying an innocent is like slaying all of mankind unless it is done to punish villainy. Radical Muslims seize on this loophole. Moderate Muslims sanitize it. Reform-minded Muslims must reinterpret it.

How this happens could well be the next chapter in reclaiming Shariah reasoning and the richness of Islam itself.

Irshad Manji, a fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy, directs the Moral Courage Project at New York University.

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 9:49 pm

Islam in NYTimes continued...

Do not forget who Rashid Khalidi is...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Khalidi-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Red, White, Blue and Green
By RASHID KHALIDI

AMERICAN CRESCENT

A Muslim Cleric on the Power of His Faith, the Struggle Against Prejudice, and the Future of Islam and America.

By Hassan Qazwini.

Illustrated. 282 pp. Random House. $26.95.

This book is many things. It is, first, a personal chronicle of Imam Hassan Qazwini’s own trajectory from Karbala, Iraq, where he was born in 1964, to exile in Kuwait and Iran, to Dearborn, Mich., where he currently heads the Islamic Center of America. Second, it is an argument for Qazwini’s variety of Shia Islam, rooted in Iraq and Iran and adapted for America. Finally, it is a political statement — in fact, two of them — a plea for Muslim Americans to immerse themselves in the life of the United States while simultaneously deepening their identification as Muslims, and also for a particular outcome in Iraq, where Qazwini’s father, a leading ayatollah, is imam of the mosque of Imam Hussein in Karbala.

“American Crescent” introduces non-Muslim American readers to the world of Iraqi Shiism into which Qazwini was born (and which he left in 1971 at the age of 6), and of the daily oppression Iraqis, especially clerics, endured under Saddam Hussein. It is, as well, an introduction to the world of Iranian religious students and clerics, in which Qazwini lived for many years, and to the world of Muslims in the United States, where he has lived since 1992. Qazwini’s account of all these worlds is well drawn and dramatic. It is striking, moreover, how easily he glides from the personal to the religious, from accounts of his life and his family to those of the lives of the Prophet and the Shiite imams. This approach links the different elements of his book, and also illustrates the close connection between the present and the formative era of Islam for someone of Qazwini’s background, training and outlook.

Qazwini draws on his rich knowledge of Islam and of Shiism, along with his 15 years of experience of American life, to explain his faith to readers who do not share it. This feature of the book bears comparison with Tariq Ramadan’s “In the Footsteps of the Prophet,” a strikingly liberal account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad meant for both Muslim and non-Muslim readers. Qazwini not only explains basic facts about Islam, but also usefully delineates where Shiite interpretations differ from those of Sunnis.

Some mainstream Sunnis may quibble with Qazwini’s accounts of various doctrinal disputes. But it is worth noting as well that some of Qazwini’s views will jar the sensibilities of those who might be called, for want of a better term, secular Muslims, who live in the United States and throughout the Islamic world. For them, being a Muslim does not necessarily involve the prescriptions Qazwini lays down, however well he argues that these can be integrated with life in a secular world. As for those non-Muslims for whom Islam is an object of suspicion, if not hatred, Qazwini’s learned and patient expositions are unlikely to cause them to cease their prejudice or to slake their hostility.

It is the political part of “American Crescent” that is both strongest and weakest. It is strongest in making the case for American Muslims to become more involved in national life, following the example of other immigrant communities in developing political power first at the local level, and eventually at the national one. From his vantage point in the Detroit metropolitan area, which he describes as “the Muslim capital of the West,” Qazwini is well placed to observe the slow growth in self-confidence, involvement and political clout of Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans. And he vigorously assails those in his own community who argue that there is no point in entering American politics to contest those with an inveterate hostility to Muslims and Arabs.

Here, history is probably on Qazwini’s side. A vast majority of his community arrived in this country after restrictive immigration laws were loosened in 1965 and have only now begun to assimilate fully into American life. As more and more Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans speak English as their native language, attend American schools and colleges, gain professional training, go on to successful jobs and careers and achieve prosperity and greater integration into the life of their communities, they will inevitably shed their virtual invisibility in the politics of the United States. (Whether they follow Qazwini’s prescriptions for a separate educational path up to and possibly through the university level is another matter.)

It is with regard to Iraq that Qazwini’s approach is weakest. He is certainly right to argue against the murderous hostility toward Shiites on the part of extreme Salafis and jihadis in Iraq, against the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of Wahhabi doctrine regarding the Shiites (and many others) and against the cruel persecution of Iraq’s Shiites in the past — not to mention the discrimination they have been facing in Saudi Arabia right up to the present. In Iraq the Shiites fully deserve the representation that their large numbers entitle them to. But to suggest that the aspirations of this formerly downtrodden segment of the population can be represented only by essentially sectarian political formations (like those that were put into power in Baghdad by the American occupation) closes off options that might be desired by millions of Iraqis who do not necessarily wish to mix their religion with their politics. It is also to fall into the trap of assuming the inevitability and the desirability of a sectarian (and ethnic) framework for Iraqi politics that was in large measure the creation of the American occupation of Iraq.

Moreover, Qazwini’s depiction of the actions and attitudes of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs — whom he seems to characterize as being dominated either by fanatically anti-

Shiite Salafis led by foreigners or by equally ruthless Baathists — is highly selective and partisan. It does not allow for the possibility that most Sunnis simply want to play an appropriate role in the politics of their country, from which they have been largely shut out since 2003, and to end the American occupation and its intrusive intervention in every important aspect of Iraqi life, something also desired by most Shiites.

These flaws notwithstanding, “American Crescent” is a useful book, especially for American readers who are unfamiliar with Islam or who wonder how Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans can be integrated into American life. It does not chart the only possible path to such integration, but it illustrates well the one that many have embarked on.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia. His most recent book is “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.”

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:07 pm

Someone we know and respect...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Ali-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Blind Faiths
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

THE SUICIDE OF REASON

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Enlightenment.

By Lee Harris.

290 pp. Basic Books. $26.

Several authors have published books on radical Islam’s threat to the West since that shocking morning in September six years ago. With “The Suicide of Reason,” Lee Harris joins their ranks. But he distinguishes himself by going further than most of his counterparts: he considers the very worst possibility — the destruction of the West by radical Islam. There is a sense of urgency in his writing, a desire to shake awake the leaders of the West, to confront them with their failure to understand that they are engaged in a war with an adversary who fights by the law of the jungle.

Harris, the author of “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History,” devotes most of his book to identifying and distinguishing between two kinds of fanaticism. The first is Islamic fanaticism, a formidable enemy in the struggle for cultural survival. In Harris’s view, this fanaticism has acted as a “defense mechanism,” shielding Islam from the pressures of the changing world around it and allowing it to expand into territories and cultures where it had previously been unknown.

With few exceptions, Harris sees Islamic expansion as permanent. Although this point is arguable, he bravely attempts to make the case that the entry of Islam into another culture produces changes on every level, from political to personal: “Wherever Islam has spread, there has occurred a total and revolutionary transformation in the culture of those conquered or converted.”

In describing the imperialist nature of Islam, Harris suggests that it is distinct from the Roman, British and French empires. He views Islamic imperialism as a single-minded expansion of the religion itself; the empire that it envisions is governed by Allah. In this sense, the idea of jihad is less about the inner struggle for peace and justice and more about a grand mission of conversion. It should be said, however, that Harris’s argument is incomplete, since he does not address the spread of Christianity in the Roman, British and French empires.

The expansion of Islam is perhaps more potent than the expansion of the Christian empires (including Rome after Constantine) because the concept of separating the sacred from the profane has never been acceptable in Islam the way it has been in Christianity. The Romans, the British and the French went about annexing large parts of the world more for earthly or material gain than for spiritual dominance. Under these empires, the clergy was allowed to propagate its faith as long as it did not jeopardize imperial interests.

Harris goes on to argue that the Muslim world, since it is governed by the law of the jungle, makes group survival paramount. This explains in part the willingness of Muslims to become martyrs for the larger community, the umma — uniting peoples separated by geographical boundaries, with different cultures, heritages and languages. According to Harris, this sense of solidarity is sustainable only with the weapon of fanaticism, which obligates each member of the umma to convert infidels and to threaten those who attempt to leave with death. That is, the aim of Muslim culture, so different from that of the West, is both to preserve and to convert, and this is what enables it to spread across the globe.

The second fanaticism that Harris identifies is one he views as infecting Western societies; he calls it a “fanaticism of reason.” Reason, he says, contains within itself a potential fatality because it blinds Western leaders to the true nature of Islamic-influenced cultures. Westerners see these cultures merely as different versions of the world they know, with dominant values similar to those espoused in their own culture. But this, Harris argues, is a fatal mistake. It implies that the West fails to appreciate both its history and the true nature of its opposition.

Nor, he points out, is the failure linked to a particular political outlook. Liberals and conservatives alike share this misperception. Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz agreed, Harris writes, “that you couldn’t really blame the terrorists, since they were merely the victims of an evil system — for Chomsky, American imperialism, for Wolfowitz, the corrupt and despotic regimes of the Middle East.” That is to say, while left and right may disagree on the causes and the remedies, they both overlook the fanaticism inherent in Islam itself. Driven by their blind faith in reason, they interpret the problem in a way that is familiar to them, in order to find a solution that fits within their doctrine of reason. The same is true for such prominent intellectuals as Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama.

Harris does not regard Islamic fanaticism as a deviancy or a madness that affects a few Muslims and terrifies many. Instead he argues that fanaticism is the basic principle in Islam. “The Muslims are, from an early age, indoctrinated into a shaming code that demands a fanatical rejection of anything that threatens to subvert the supremacy of Islam,” he writes. During the years that this shaming code is instilled into children, the collective is emphasized above the individual and his freedoms. A good Muslim must forsake all: his property, family, children, even life for the sake of Islam. Boys in particular are taught to be dominating and merciless, which has the effect of creating a society of holy warriors.

By contrast, the West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, and an elaborate system in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words. The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. This ethos rejects fanaticism. The alpha male is pacified and groomed to study hard, find a good job and plan prudently for retirement: “While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin,” Harris writes, “the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive and ruthless.”

The West has variously tried to convert, to assimilate and to seduce Muslims into modernity, but, Harris says, none of these approaches have succeeded. Meanwhile, our worship of reason is making us easy prey for a ruthless, unscrupulous and extremely aggressive predator and may be contributing to a slow cultural “suicide.”

Harris’s book is so engaging that it is difficult to put down, and its haunting assessments make it difficult for a reader to sleep at night. He deserves praise for raising serious questions. But his arguments are not entirely sound.

I disagree, for instance, that the way to rescue Western civilization from a path of suicide is to challenge its tradition of reason. Indeed, for all his understanding of the rise of fanaticism in general and its Islamic manifestation in particular, Harris’s use of the term “reason” is faulty.

Enlightenment thinkers, preoccupied with both individual freedom and secular and limited government, argued that human reason is fallible. They understood that reason is more than just rational thought; it is also a process of trial and error, the ability to learn from past mistakes. The Enlightenment cannot be fully appreciated without a strong awareness of just how frail human reason is. That is why concepts like doubt and reflection are central to any form of decision-making based on reason.

Harris is pessimistic in a way that the Enlightenment thinkers were not. He takes a Darwinian view of the struggle between clashing cultures, criticizing the West for an ethos of selfishness, and he follows Hegel in asserting that where the interest of the individual collides with that of the state, it is the state that should prevail. This is why he attributes such strength to Islamic fanaticism. The collectivity of the umma elevates the communal interest above that of the individual believer. Each Muslim is a slave, first of God, then of the caliphate. Although Harris does not condone this extreme subversion of the self, still a note of admiration seems to creep into his descriptions of Islam’s fierce solidarity, its adherence to tradition and the willingness of individual Muslims to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the greater good.

In addition, Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

To argue, as Harris seems to do, that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism and create phalanxes of alpha males are doomed — and will doom others — to an existence governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West’s own past. There have been periods when the West was less than noble, when it engaged in crusades, inquisitions, witch-burnings and genocides. Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even — and this should surely relieve Harris of some of his pessimism — willing to die for it, perhaps with the same fanaticism as the jihadists willing to die for their tribe. In short, while this conflict is undeniably a deadly struggle between cultures, it is individuals who will determine the outcome.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is the author of “Infidel.”

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:24 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Rodenbeck-t.html?_r=1&oref=login&pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
The Early Days
By MAX RODENBECK

THE GREAT ARAB CONQUESTS

How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In.

By Hugh Kennedy.

Illustrated. 421 pp. Da Capo Press. $27.95.

Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.

The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture, politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. It created, for the first and only time, an empire based entirely upon a single faith, bound by its laws and devoted to its propagation. It uprooted long-embedded native religions, like Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in Central Asia and Hinduism in much of the Indus Valley. It transformed Arabic from a desert dialect into a world language that, for centuries, supplanted Latin and Greek as the main repository of human knowledge.

And yet strangely, the question of how the Muslim Arabs achieved all this, in such a short time, remains puzzling. Not that no one has tried to explain it. The Arabs themselves built a rich literary tradition around the seemingly miraculous success of Islam. But these martial histories of the futuhat, or “openings,” won by the new faith tended to focus on the moral superiority, zeal and courage of the victors rather than on more mundane factors that might have aided them. Much attention was paid to such details as the genealogy of Arab generals and the precise division of booty, at the expense of accurate chronology and geography.

Modern historians have generally discounted the Arab histories, emphasizing instead how the calamitous upheavals of late antiquity sapped capacities to resist the Muslim invasions. Because of the difficult nature of textual sources, which include rare materials in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Persian and even Chinese as well as Arabic, and because of the relative paucity of archaeological research into early Islam, recent scholarship has also tended to be area- and theme-specific. Not for a generation has anyone attempted a broad political history of Islam’s first century.

Few writers are better equipped for such a task than Hugh Kennedy. A professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, he has written scores of articles and numerous books on the early period of Islam, including popular histories as well as scholarly studies. Kennedy is a fastidious historian, refraining from undue speculation and sticking close to his sources. He is also a judicious one. Rather than dismissing suspect material, like triumphalist Muslim histories, he prefers to sift through them in search of clues. Occasionally, he finds corroborating evidence that some of these accounts appear closer to the truth than fellow historians have assumed.

Given the immense geographical scope of the work and the spotty, disjointed nature of the evidence, Kennedy has wisely chosen to organize the book simply, in more or less chronological fashion, one campaign after another. He begins, however, with a pair of useful chapters, one surveying the textual and archaeological sources for the period, the second outlining the shape of Arab society at the onset of the great Islamic expansion.

Far from being wild, illiterate Bedouins, Kennedy shows, the early Muslim leaders were sophisticated townsmen and highly competent commanders. Once they had rallied a critical mass of converts, the swift adherence to the new faith of tribes from across the Arabian Peninsula created its own impetus for conquest. Arabian society had been geared to intertribal conflict. Having now submitted to the authority of a single leader, the Muslim caliph, nomadic warriors had to direct their energies outward or risk tearing the nascent Islamic nation apart. Their fighting spirit was further primed by the doctrine of jihad, which promised both earthly and heavenly rewards. Martyrs were assured a special place in paradise, while soldiers were allowed to keep four-fifths of captured booty.

Yet the Muslims’ esprit de corps, their desert-trained mobility and the cleverness of their generals still cannot explain how such astonishingly small armies — perhaps 30,000 men for the conquest of Syria, 10,000 for Iraq, 16,000 for Egypt — so swiftly overran these densely populated lands. Several other factors proved crucial. The most important was timing.

Beginning around 540, repeated epidemics of bubonic plague appear to have drastically reduced populations across the Near East and the Mediterranean. Political turmoil was to weaken the region more. Using the assassination of the Byzantine emperor Maurice in 602 as a pretext, the shah of Sasanian Persia, Chosroes II, mounted a blitzkrieg that swept his armies through the rich provinces of Syria and Egypt, and across Anatolia as far as Constantinople. It was not until 624 that the Byzantines under Heraclius counterattacked, landing an army on the shore of the Black Sea, behind Persian lines, that sacked and pillaged its way south through the Persian heartlands. Heraclius recaptured Jerusalem in 630, while Chosroes’ son Kavad II, who ascended to the throne after his father was murdered in a coup, sued for peace.

But the decades of war, in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino script, had left both Byzantium and Persia stunned and bleeding. The sudden Muslim advance found them completely unprepared. As Kennedy notes, “If Muhammad had been born a generation earlier and he and his successors had attempted to send armies against the great empires in, say, 600, it is hard to imagine they would have made any progress at all.”

Worse yet, for Heraclius, schism among Christian sects led many Egyptians and Syrians to side with the Arab invaders against the Byzantines, who had tried to impose orthodoxy by brute force. To the Muslims’ further advantage, they demanded relatively lenient terms: those among the vanquished who did not embrace Islam could worship as they liked, on payment of an annual tax that was no more burdensome than what they had paid before.

The Muslim advance was not always painless, as Kennedy reveals in a poignant chapter that gives voice to the conquered. On several occasions, cities that resisted were razed, their inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. In North Africa, the scale of slave raiding was so large that it sparked a huge Berber uprising. Across much of the swiftly conquered territory, the Muslims’ hold remained tenuous for generations. It is significant that the expansion out of Arabia happened in two waves. The first exploited the weakness of the collapsed neighboring empires. The second, two generations later, used the Muslims’ newfound strength but failed to push borders back very far. It is remarkable, in fact, how stable the peripheries of Islam have remained ever since, excepting the loss of Spain to the Christian Reconquista and Muslim forays into India, the Balkans and the East Indies. But these events came centuries later, and Islam’s final military triumphs were achieved not by Arabs, but by Turks.

Kennedy’s reluctance to pronounce sweeping judgments may disappoint general readers. His preference for dwelling on lesser-known episodes like the conquest of Central Asia, rather than on such oft-related exploits as the capture of Spain, is also more likely to please scholars than laymen. Fellow historians may fault Kennedy, too, for relying on textual evidence more than on archaeology. Nevertheless, this brisk yet richly detailed account is likely to remain the best we have for many years.

Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:25 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Telhami-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Cartoon Villains
By SHIBLEY TELHAMI

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Making Muslims the Enemy.

By Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg.

Illustrated. 181 pp. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. $19.95.

Is there such a thing as Islamophobia? To show there is, Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg cite a CNN anchor telling Keith Ellison, the first Muslim American congressman: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Presumably, the anchor believed that his viewers shared this anxiety — and popular culture seems to bear that out, according to Gottschalk and Greenberg. “Many members of the media,” they write, “characterize Muslims as Muslims to the exclusion of any other aspect of their identity.”

While “Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy” examines images of Muslims in media like TV and the movies, the strength of the book — and its focus — is its collection of cartoons published since 9/11, most of which portray Muslims unfavorably. The cartoons show violent, oversexed males, oppressed females, deceptive foreigners. The cartoonists, the authors argue, frequently conflate terrorist groups or the Taliban with Muslims or Arabs in general. One example shows the Taliban in Arab headdresses. “The underlying presumption is that Pashtun Muslims dress as all Muslims dress — as the stereotyped Arab.” (They don’t.) Another cartoon, they say, suggests that “Islamic beliefs inflamed Arab hatred of the United States.”

Still, it’s hard to tell how representative these examples are, since we can’t compare them with other cartoons that may have been more balanced. It’s also hard to measure their impact on public opinion.

Gottschalk, a professor of religion at Wesleyan University, and Greenberg, a recent Wesleyan graduate, attempt to place the cartoons in a historical perspective dating to the Islamic conquests and the crusades. The illustrators, the authors write, “drew on images they associated with Islam, having inherited these conceptions from the Orientalist artistic legacy of the United States, as well as from impressions — perhaps latent — of Islam understood from European history.” Yet their account of the historical background is far too brief and one-dimensional to be of much help in understanding contemporary attitudes.

How much does history matter, anyway? American views of Muslims are probably more a function of present-day politics and strategic interests than of images in the media. Throughout much of the 20th century, particularly during the cold war, Muslims were often seen as friends and allies of the United States. Even jihad was viewed as a good thing when it was understood as motivating the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

To be sure, there have always been those who were so prejudiced that they have had only negative images of the Muslim world, just as there have always been those ready to exploit such hatred for their own ends. As the authors suggest, the media in general and cartoonists in particular play a role. But most Americans today view Arabs and Muslims through the painful prism of 9/11, just as most Arabs and Muslims see America through their own prisms of pain: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and, more recently, the war in Iraq. These prisms are inevitably distorting; people see primarily those aspects of the Other that relate to their pain and ignore most else. The greater the pain, the more the distortion.

Gottschalk and Greenberg suggest how cartoonists might behave in covering Islam. They recommend avoiding stereotypes and presenting Muslim Americans “acting as Americans.” But it’s doubtful such advice will make much difference, since the most meaningful protections against hatred lie with society’s legal, political and educational systems. Here, it must be said, the verdict is mixed.

“Islamophobia” would have been stronger had it explored some of these larger issues. Government violations of law in the name of national security, for example, are all too well known, as is the rush to enact new legislation that intrudes into civil liberties, especially those of Muslim and Arab-Americans and of foreign nationals. It is not cartoonists who set the tone of debate in times of crisis, but government officials. It’s true that the initial reaction of the White House and Congressional leaders toward Islam was largely positive after 9/11. But as the war on terrorism expanded, officials in Washington became less inclined to confront anti-Muslim bias, and sometimes viewed Muslims as suspects. Here the authors might have drawn on available evidence: of the thousands of Muslims held in preventive detention, not a single individual has been convicted of a terrorist crime.

There is obvious anxiety about Islam in America today. Anchors for CNN are not the only ones who feel it. But that anxiety is not as deep as Gottschalk and Greenberg suggest. A shift in strategic interests could easily transform perceptions once again. Even now, the American educational system remains a strong force for civil liberties: most students in the country continue to be taught to be blind to race and religion. Many Americans, meanwhile, have genuinely sought to learn more about Islam, and a number of moviemakers, writers, journalists and scholars have moved to meet the demand for more balanced information. Despite these efforts, the trauma of 9/11 is very likely to shape the views of many Americans for years to come.

Shibley Telhami is a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:26 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Goodwin-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
The Pragmatic Caliphs
By JASON GOODWIN

PEACE BE UPON YOU

The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence.

By Zachary Karabell.

343 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Many Westerners think the world would be safer if it were less Muslim, more Western. And in the Middle East and beyond, many Muslims are horrified by our arrogance; a tiny minority respond with violence. Yet the so-called clash of civilizations, as Zachary Karabell’s important new book demonstrates, draws strength from a profoundly partial reading of history. “Peace Be Upon You” is a polemic in the service of peace — readable, accessible and, maybe, indispensable.

Karabell, the author of “Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal,” begins with a brief but very clear account of early Islam, turning easy assumptions on their heads. He explains that the faith was not created in direct opposition to the other monotheistic religions; it built upon them, and against the tribal pantheism of seventh-century Arabia. Muslims believe that with Muhammad, the revelation given to earlier prophets was perfected.

Islam was generally not spread by the sword, either. True, a Muslim military caste defeated, and replaced, existing rulers, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian or pagan. Still, ordinary life went on. Even the dreaded jihad, Karabell writes, was an ambiguous concept, and could mean a moral program of self-discipline and purification.

Karabell’s Islam is a multifaceted faith that has no pope, no single interpretation of the law. In Muhammad’s lifetime the holy city of Medina was an ideal, never “a viable model for Muslim society.” After the Arabs conquered the Middle East scarcely a decade following the Prophet’s death in 632, they faced the problem of how to govern the conquered. What, in effect, would Muslim society be in the real world?

The short answer, Karabell says, was: tolerant. Pragmatism prevailed in most Muslim states from then on, for nearly 1,400 years. In both North Africa and Spain, ordinary people sometimes converted, hoping for access to wealth and status. Often the conversions were sincere. They were welcomed, within limits, but they were very rarely forced. Only reverse conversions were anathema to the Muslim authorities: apostasy was a crime.

Islamic rulers, like rulers anywhere, enjoyed the benefits of the powerful, financed by public taxation, while the public, as usual, grumbled, married, had children, died. The rulers spent the money in different ways, depending on their outlook and opportunities; some pursued wild game, others translations of Greek philosophy. Some were strict and pious, others drank and recited poetry. Harun al-Rashid, best known from “A Thousand and One Nights,” did them all together.

Jerusalem fell to Frankish Crusaders in 1099, and there was a gruesome massacre that shocked even its perpetrators. But here Karabell brings out another strand of his narrative, rightly asserting that to dwell on the massacre is to misunderstand the significance of the next 200 years of frequent coexistence in the Middle East. The complexity of the Muslim-Christian relationship of the time belies the supposition that it should be viewed in terms of a religious conflict. Christians battled Muslims, certainly; but Muslims fought Muslims, too, and everyone sought logical alliances, holy or otherwise.

But if the Crusades were not exclusively, or even primarily, religious, why were they fought? For the usual rewards, Karabell says — trade, influence and dynastic advantage. Had it been otherwise, he writes, “Christians throughout Europe would have rushed to fight side by side with their Byzantine brothers, and Muslims would have overcome their divisions and joined hands to fight a common adversary. That did not happen.”

Over time, however, the Crusades became established as a myth of perpetual conflict, to be exploited at different times, and in different societies, for particular historical reasons. So Sir Walter Scott’s Muslim warrior Saladin was the avatar of British chivalry, not because this is what Saladin was, but because Scott was a 19th-century Briton. Most other versions were more loaded and inflammatory.

After the era of the Crusades, Karabell reports, pragmatism continued to hold sway in the Muslim world. By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Turks’ capture of Egypt and the cities of Medina and Mecca made them the pre-eminent Islamic rulers of the world, responsible, among other things, for subsidizing and protecting the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and the government of Jerusalem. The Ottomans placed great stress on their Islamic credentials — which did not stop them from ruling over millions of Christians, or from welcoming the Jews from Christian Spain after their expulsion in 1492.

The Ottomans were dynasts. They waged endless wars, against both their Western enemies and the Shiite empire in the east, to maintain their control and to expand their dominions. Sometimes these wars were styled as jihad. But the Turks had no more interest than the Arabs in converting people. Their non-Muslim subjects were second-class citizens — they paid a valuable head tax, and they were exempt from military service — but they were citizens nonetheless. They were answerable to the leaders of their faiths — the patriarch, or the chief rabbi; so that a Jew in Salonika or a Greek in Smyrna seldom encountered the Ottoman authorities.

The career of Sabbatai Sevi, a Jew who considered himself the Messiah, is a perfect illustration of Ottoman pragmatism. When he toured the Jewish communities of the Ottoman world gathering adherents and outraging the Jewish establishment with his mystic utterances and scandalous decrees, the Ottomans ignored him. But when he marched on Istanbul, he was arrested for inciting rebellion, interrogated and compelled to choose between converting to Islam or being executed. Sevi converted. Order was maintained.

What, then, accounts for the current hostility? Insecurity, of course, is widespread in the Muslim world. And terrorism works very well in an age of mass global communications and sophisticated technology. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates injustice, gets worse daily and has encouraged a complete reinterpretation of history. As this enlightened and enlightening book makes clear, we can, if we want, find evidence of clash and discord in the past, which makes for good reading. But we can also, if we wish, find many centuries, and many lands, in which nothing much happened, triumphantly — in which people of all faiths concerned themselves with “the uneventful reality of everyday life.” History matters; but, in Karabell’s resounding phrase, “it is up to each of us to use it well.”

Jason Goodwin is the author of “Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire.” His most recent book is an Ottoman crime novel, “The Snake Stone.”

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:27 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Wildman-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Caught in the Ayatollah’s Web
By SARAH WILDMAN
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PRISONER OF TEHRAN

A Memoir.

By Marina Nemat.

306 pp. Free Press. $26.

MY LIFE AS A TRAITOR

By Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman.

242 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.

How many men and women have been brutalized in Evin, Tehran’s notorious political prison? Built by the shah, the prison became a ghoulish instrument of the ayatollah after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Although Evin remains the repressive arm of the state, we rarely hear about its victims. (One notable exception is the Iranian-born Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who made headlines after she died under interrogation there in 2003.)

Two women, Marina Nemat and Zarah Ghahramani, both safely ensconced in the West, have now come forward with memoirs of their imprisonment at Evin. Their testimonies, recounting experiences separated by more than 20 years, illuminate Iran’s human rights abuses and speak to the moral dismemberment of a society based in fear and repression.

Nemat’s and Ghahramani’s accounts of arrest, torture and imprisonment are depressingly familiar. We have read these descriptions of beatings, humiliation and terror before, from Chile to Burma to Abu Ghraib. In each case, there is a weird sameness: the blindfolding, removal of human contact, debasing. Yet each victim has her own story to tell.

Marina Nemat grew up in 1970s Tehran in a middle-class Catholic family. But after the shah was toppled and the Islamists slowly consolidated power, “the world in which I had grown up and the rules by which I had lived and which I had believed to be set in stone were falling apart,” Nemat recalls. “I was a stranger in my own life.” Here we hear echoes of other Iranian memoirs — namely “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel. Perfume and makeup disappear, girls and boys no longer hold hands, and Islam classes supplant school curriculum. The teachers in Nemat’s high school are replaced by members of Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. When Nemat raises her hand and asks to learn calculus rather than revolutionary theory, she starts an impromptu schoolwide walkout that begins her inevitable journey to Evin.

“I felt as if the country were slowly being submerged in water,” she writes. In prison, she meets a cadre of young women, each accused of a vaguely formulated antigovernment activity.

“Prisoner of Tehran” is a gripping personal history, but not a high literary event. Nemat’s prose is often treacly and hackneyed. Still, her testimony makes the book vital. She is best when relating painful stories of young people destroyed by Iran in the early 1980s. One fellow inmate, Sarah, descended into madness after her brother was executed and wrote the story of her life endlessly on her arms, legs and torso, refusing to wash lest her memories be forgotten. Nemat herself remained silent on her imprisonment for 20 years and concealed even the most bizarre twist in her story: She was briefly married to a prison interrogator, who helped commute her death sentence in exchange for her hand in marriage.

By contrast, Zarah Ghahramani wrote “My Life as a Traitor” soon after fleeing Iran for Australia. Born in 1981, she never knew a prerevolutionary Iran and held naïve hope that recent reforms would grant at least a modicum of personal freedom. In 2001, when she was 20, Ghahramani was tortured and imprisoned at Evin for her role in a protest at Tehran University. Wrapped in “a cloak of snobbishness,” she writes, “I hadn’t believed that my life could be invaded by people I considered beneath me.”

The details here are sharp, evocative — and angry. Her hands turn a “weird blue” after being tied behind her for hours; her scalp bleeds and itches when her hair is aggressively shorn as punishment. She longs for small pleasures, like pink shoes. In the midst of a beating, she worries that a cut on her chin will become infected. “I will become deformed and ugly,” she writes. “I will no longer be a pretty Persian girl. ... How powerful my vanity is!”

Ghahramani’s descriptions of torture are described unsparingly. She staves off insanity by talking to the man in an adjacent cell, her “madman,” who keeps her alive partly by insistently speaking to her. Ghahramani, who had been studying translation and Spanish before her arrest, cites a poem by Federico García Lorca: “Oh, death awaits me / before I get to Córdoba!”

Ghahramani thinks of herself “as a Persian rather than as an Iranian.” Her book, written with the journalist Robert Hillman, is a defense of Persian and Kurdish identity (she has both), Farsi and her anger at those who have subverted Persia. “I want my children to read Sadi and Hafiz and Khayyam and Rumi,” she writes. “Then I want them to read the Code of the Council of Guardians.” Why, she asks, have the mullahs “squandered such a beautiful language on this nonsense?”

In “Prisoner of Tehran,” Nemat asks her godmother why the family never asked any questions about her incarceration. “We’re afraid to ask because we’re afraid of knowing,” the woman answers.

Resistance to that fear animates these two important and chillingly universal memoirs.

Sarah Wildman, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, writes on Islam and migration in Europe.

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:34 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Reiss-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Freedom at Gunpoint
By TOM REISS
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NAPOLEON’S EGYPT

Invading the Middle East.

By Juan Cole.

Illustrated. 279 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $24.95.

In early 1798 the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.

As the most strategic Middle Eastern nation in the days before oil, Egypt was the key to controlling Jerusalem and the overland trade routes to India, the source of so much British wealth. The Expédition d’Égypte, as the French persist in calling the operation to this day, was supposed to cripple the British Empire without the risk of a frontal assault. There were also French schemes for turning Egypt into a vast sugar plantation and for digging the Suez Canal. Most of all, for Napoleon, who modeled himself on classical conquerors (“I saw myself on the road to Asia, riding on an elephant, a turban on my head”), Egypt was the first step in a grand dream of a Pan-Asian empire.

Most books on the expedition focus on the outsize characters of Napoleon and his staff, men like his towering second in command, Gen. Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who was eventually stabbed to death by a fanatical Muslim, or Gen. Jacques Menou, who converted to Islam. But in “Napoleon’s Egypt,” Juan Cole, who teaches history at the University of Michigan and writes a widely cited blog on current United States policy in the Muslim world, mostly ignores these larger-than-life characters to present the invasion and occupation through Egyptian eyes. Cole says his work “attends more closely than have others ... to the interplay of the ideas of the French revolutionary period with Ottoman and Egyptian ways of life,” and what it lacks in narrative drive and coherence, it makes up for in fascinating quotations, mostly from contemporary memoirs and diaries, and in an analysis that suggests comparisons to the current American adventure in Iraq.

Napoleon’s plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes — the despotic local rulers — with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics. In a proclamation distributed in Arabic, Napoleon declared that he was a defender of Islam, come to liberate the Egyptians from tyranny. He took advantage of the fact that most revolutionary French soldiers were deists or atheists to suggest that this meant they were in fact “muslims” — “with a small ‘m,’ ” as Cole points out — because their rejection of the Trinity meant they had “submitted to the one God.”

Cole speculates that Napoleon’s “Proclamation to the Egyptians” failed largely because it was so badly translated into Arabic. “The French,” he writes, “first appeared to the small elite of literate Egyptians through the filter of a barbarous accent and writing style, making them seem rather ridiculous, despite Bonaparte’s imperial pretensions.”

From Alexandria the French advanced to Cairo, and near the pyramids they vanquished a vast army of Mameluke horsemen, cutting down the charging Egyptian riders with grim efficiency. The Mameluke leader Murad Bey fled to Upper Egypt to wage a brutal insurgency, along with the Bedouin tribes, against the occupiers. Meanwhile, on Aug. 1, Admiral Nelson discovered the French beachhead, and in what became known as the Battle of the Nile, destroyed the French fleet. Cut off, with no means of outside supply, Napoleon’s expeditionary army was forced to attempt to become true rulers of Egypt.

All through the summer and early fall of 1798 Napoleon tried to establish a pro-French representative government and to modernize Cairo. His ships had famously ferried over not just soldiers but a small army of French mathematicians, inventors, scientists, artists and writers, and these savants explored the pyramids, discovered the Rosetta stone and assembled material for the “Description de l’Égypte,” the 24-volume masterpiece that was published years later. They also did things like map Cairo (which was larger than Paris at the time), illuminate its streets, construct hospitals, supervise elections and even help feed the population by building modern bakeries.

When the people of Cairo revolted, in October 1798, they made a point of assassinating the bakers. The uprising, and its bloody repression by the French, turned the occupation into a series of escalating atrocities on both sides. Plague struck Cairo, as it did so often in the 18th century, and the French soldiers took to avoiding human contact by handling their orders with wooden pincers. Still, the disease devastated occupiers and occupied alike, and the locals took the combination of uprising and plague as a signal to double their attacks on all Frenchmen and collaborators. (Cole gives an interesting explanation, not available in other accounts, of how the Egyptians had exploited outbreaks of plague in the years before Napoleon’s arrival as a means of fending off Ottoman control of the region, and hence were well versed in the tactics of using local misery to defeat benevolent foreign occupiers.)

Napoleon’s secretary, Louis Bourrienne, summed up the emerging French point of view of the expedition: “Egypt was no longer the empire of the Ptolemies, covered with populous and wealthy cities; it now presented one unvaried scene of devastation and misery. Instead of being aided by the inhabitants, whom we had ruined ... we found all against us. ... No Frenchman was secure of his life who happened to stray half a mile from any inhabited place, or the corps to which he belonged.”

The Expédition d’Égypte has often been remembered as the starting point for Egyptology or for foreshadowing Napoleon’s later campaigns, but the current disaster in Iraq may finally reframe it as the colossal premonitory event it was. Cole notes that “only four times in modern history have Muslim clerics come to power in the Middle East: under the republican French in Egypt, under Khomeini and his successors in Iran, under the Taliban in Afghanistan and, it could be argued, with the victory of the United Iraqi Alliance in the Iraq elections of 30 January, 2005 (the U.I.A. was led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim). The first and fourth times both took place with Western, Enlightenment backing.”

It’s a suggestive point, presented in passing without being developed. That’s unfortunate, because Cole is best when he organizes his material around argument and analysis, not storytelling. (He states in the acknowledgments that he aims to produce “an intimate history, of what the French Annales school calls ‘mentalités,’ that is, a history of mind-sets.”) As a result, his book is more suited to students of the region than to casual readers, and those looking for an exciting, comprehensive narrative history of the whole expedition are advised to hunt down Paul Strathern’s book “Napoleon in Egypt,” which was published in England earlier this year.

Cole basically ends his account in 1799, but the French remained in Egypt for another two years, until they finally surrendered to the British on Sept. 2, 1801 — turning over, among other things, the prized Rosetta stone. Before he departed in October 1799, Napoleon captured Gaza and Jaffa (part of modern Tel Aviv), but the roguish Sir Sidney Smith engineered a huge British victory at Acre, the city known as “the key to Palestine.” The magnitude of the defeat was such that Napoleon later declared, “That man made me miss my destiny.”

Napoleon may have thought that it was Sir Sidney who made him miss his destiny, but his own misunderstanding of the Middle East was the real culprit. Bourrienne captured the truth when he lamented that Egypt was no longer the empire of the Ptolemies — General Ptolemy had been a Macedonian officer in the invading army of Alexander, and yet the Egyptians accepted him and his descendants as pharaohs for the next three centuries, until Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, committed suicide. The 18th-century Egyptians were not about to accept a new Ptolemy in the form of a Corsican French general, no matter what modern marvels and liberties Napoleon promised them.

Tom Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” is writing a biography of Gen. Alexandre Dumas.

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:35 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Goldberg-t.html?pagewanted=print

January 6, 2008
Seeds of Hate
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
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JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED

Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11.

By Matthias Küntzel.

Translated by Colin Meade.

180 pp. Telos Press Publishing. $29.95.

One day in Damascus not long ago, I visited the understocked gift shop of the Sheraton Hotel, looking for something to read. There wasn’t much: pre-owned Grishams, a hagiography of Hafez al-Assad, an early Bill O’Reilly (go figure) and a paperback copy of “The International Jew,” published in 2000 in Beirut. “The International Jew” is a collection of columns exposing the putative role of Jews in such fields as international finance, world governance and bootlegging. “Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequiously,” the book states. These columns, which are based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — they are a plagiary of a forgery, in other words — were first published in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent more than 80 years ago.

Next to “The International Jew” was a copy of “The Bible Came From Arabia,” a piece of twaddle that suggests the Jews are not Jews and Israel isn’t Israel. And then there was a pamphlet called “Secrets of the Talmud.” Not knowing these secrets (I was raised Reform), I started reading. The Talmud apparently teaches Jews how best to demolish the world economy and gives Jews the right to take non-Jewish women as slaves and rape them.

The anti-Semitic worldview, generally speaking, is fantastically stupid. If its propagandists actually understood the chosen people, they would know, for instance, that no one, not the chief of Mossad, not even the president of Hadassah, could persuade 4,000 Jews to stay home from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. (“And why should I listen to you?” would have been the near-universal rebuttal to the call.) Anti-Semitic conspiracy literature not only posits crude and senseless ideas, but also tends to be riddled with typos, repetitions and gross errors of grammar, and for this and other reasons I occasionally have trouble taking it seriously.

The German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews — intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs — have become scandalously ubiquitous. Hezbollah and Hamas, to name two prominent examples, understand the world largely through the prism of Jewish power. Hezbollah officials employ language that shamelessly echoes Nazi propaganda, describing Jews as parasites and tumors and prescribing the murder of Jews as a kind of chemotherapy.

The question is not only why, of course, but how: how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse? The notion of the Jew as malevolently omnipotent is not a traditional Muslim notion. Jews do not come off well in the Koran — they connive and scheme and reject the message of the Prophet Muhammad — but they are shown to be, above all else, defeated. Muhammad, we read, conquered the Jews in battle and set them wandering. In subsequent centuries Jews lived among Muslims, and it is true that their experience was generally healthier than that of their brethren in Christendom, but only so long as they knew their place; they were ruled and taxed as second-class citizens and were often debased by statute. In the Jim Crow Middle East, no one believed the Jews were in control.

Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.

Hassan al-Banna did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner, but through the 1930s, his movement, aided by the Germans, led the drive against not only political Zionism but Jews in general. “This burgeoning Islamist movement was subsidized with German funds,” Küntzel writes. “These contributions enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to set up a printing plant with 24 employees and use the most up-to-date propaganda methods.” The Muslim Brotherhood, Küntzel goes on, was a crucial distributor of Arabic translations of “Mein Kampf” and the “Protocols.” Across the Arab world, he states, Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.

Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies. One doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In his effort to blame Germany for Muslim anti-Semitism, he overreaches. “While Khomeini was certainly not an acolyte of Hitler, it is not unreasonable to suppose that his anti-Jewish outlook ... had been shaped during the 1930s,” Küntzel says, citing, in a footnote, an article he himself wrote. He also oversimplifies the Israeli-Arab conflict. Jews today have actual power in the Middle East, and Israel is not innocent of excess and cruelty.

Still, Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.