"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1

"If You Don't Have Tears In Your Eyes, You Will Cry In Your Heart."

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 00:11

These poignant words will stay with me until the day I die, not least because the girl who spoke them is just ten years old - a Palestinian in Gaza interviewed on tonight's "Panorama" programme on BBC1. She had just shown a picture - a drawing in typical child's form, stick figures drawn with crayons - "This is my Mum when the missile cut her in half." "This is my brother holding his baby son...his brains were dripping out." She said she still hoped to have a life, or at least half a life, but she was finding it hard to believe both her parents were dead.

This appeared to be a belated attempt by the BBC to right their bias in their reporting of the war against Gaza, as well as their bizarre refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal a couple of weeks ago in case they were seen to be anti-Israeli. Here, their reporter, Jeremy Bowen, did go out of his way to show that many many homes of Palestinians had been bombed and even susbequently flattened by Israeli bulldozers with the dead unburied still inside, entombed in their homes. And he did point out as he stood among the rubble that each pile represented someone's home or business and was unlikely to do anything but increase hatred and antagonism towards Israel.

He interviewed International Red Cross representatives who said that, in contravention of international law, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers had denied them access to the injured for 2 days and there was no evidence that they had treated anyone themsleves as they are expected to do. One boy of 15 was interviewed, his eyes bleak with despair, as he explained how he had sat with the corpse of his mother, his own legs shattered and unable to walk, while his brother slowly bled to death a few feet away.

This, we were then told by the Israeli Government spokesman, was done to stop terrorism and if people suffered it was the fault of Hamas, not the IDF weapons that rained down on Gaza. They had warned civilians to get out of areas due to be attacked he insisted - and of course claimed they only attacked buldings where Hamas fighters or weapons were.

But Gaza is a tiny, cramped place - 1.6 million people in an area smaller than the Isle of Wight - so where were these people supposed to flee to? With both Israel and Egypt keeping the tiny territory sealed, anyone inside was effectively trapped and at the mercy of what was clearly pretty indiscriminate firing by the IDF.

Bowen did not point this out, however. Just as he also failed to point out that Hamas fighters inevitably were in the streets of Gaza - because where else could they be? No modern war is fought on some neat, open battlefield like Waterloo or El Alamein. Gaza was more like Stalingrad - so if we eulogise, rightly, the Soviets who defended the ruins of that city house by house, why was it so wrong or surprising that Hamas fighters, the only army that the Gazans have, defended their city when it was attacked by fighting in that city?

Film was shown of white phosphoros shells falling on Al-Quds hospital, again in contravention of international law - by which hospitals are never to be attacked. Bowen did mention that the use of white phosphoros is illegal "in some circumstances" - he did not specify that its use in civilian areas (like hospitals) is one such; nor, more importantly, that when the first reports of its use emerged during the attack, Israel flatly denied it.

The BBC remains guilty alongside much of the rest of the international media of grossly misreporting this war. It continued even tonight to equate the puny attacks of the Hamas rockets which killed 4 Israelis to the assault of the IDF which killed 1400 Palestinians. They left unchallenged the Israeli claim that nearly all the 1400 were "Hamas terrorists", when at least 600 were children and many more were women and male civilians.

Israel will tomorrow almost certainly elect its most extreme rightwing Government in history. In pole position is likely to be a party committed to expelling the remaining Israeli Arab citizens, completing the ethnic cleansing which began in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were driven out of Israel into Gaza, which now exists as a huge, permanent refugee camp.

President Obama has early on indicated that he believes Israel has a right to expand its borders - as indeed Israel's constitution allows for, a unique position in world constitutions - and has ruled out talking to Hamas. Like the BBC, he seems to ignore the unassailable fact that Hamas is the democratically elected Palestinian government which came to power in multi-party elections - instead, like Bush before him, he is already signalling he will deal instead with the electorally defeated and discredited PLO-Fatah.

How would it be if the world had ignored Obama's election and was treating John McCain as the real President of the USA? How does he expect Hamas to respond? And how does he, and Israel, expect the people of Gaza to respond? Looking into the empty, grief-struck eyes of the traumatised children of Gaza, have they not simply created a new generation of grievance, a next generation of suicide bombers and budding rocketeers?

It is common in the West to see Israel as "like us" and the Arabs as "the Other". Yet the Palestinians we saw tonight were striking in that their world, their lives and homes, their aspirations were so like ours - the doctor who mourned his four teenage daughters, one of whom had hoped to follow him as a doctor and another studying to be a journalist; on the wall of their destroyed bedroom, next to the splattered brains of another dead daughter, a "Barbie" sticker incongruously decorated the shattered plaster. A legitimate target, the IDF spokesman said, because Hamas may have been nearby.

History is written by the victors and, in spite of a half-hearted effort, Bowen and the BBC comprehensively failed tonight to explore the truth - that this war, like the war in Lebanon in 2007, was a war embarked on by an Israeli Government with poor poll ratings and by a country terrified of any of its neighbours being successful - because if they are, they may cease to be "the Other".

Just as Lebanon has an albeit fragile unity across three or more distinct faith groups, the Palestinians contain a significant Christian minority (the so-called "Living Stones") which enjoys greater protection among its Muslim compatriots than the few Christians inside Israel have in an increasingly monolithic society. These facts are never explored, never revealed - why, for example, was Yasser Arafat trying to reach Bethlehem for the last Christmas of his life, when the IDF decided to besiege him in Gaza for the final terrible, tragic weeks of his time on earth? Because, although a Muslim himself, he was trying to join with his Christian compatriots in their religious celebrations.

The Middle East is a complex, mulitfaceted range of different societies, faiths and politics. It is this that makes it both far more tolerant than people in the West realise and which frustrates hope while simultaneously offering it - Jew, Christian and Muslim have lived longer in peace there than they have in war; it is not impossible they may do so again. But first we have to step back from the simplistic politics of confrontation where manipulative politicians deliberately drive polarisation to the extremes.

This will not suit the western media as it does not sit with a western culture which demands instant, easy explanations with things neatly fitting into boxes and defintions. But it will be the only way to find a solution, the only way to reach any ultimate truth.

And as a start, President Obama and the European Governments which between them wield so much influence over Israel need to recognise that, however unpalatable it may be, Hamas is part of that solution.

Maybe he's been watching too much of the BBC.

In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)

And the children are the second, followed by the future...