I didn’t actually have to swim across the Rio Grande. I stepped off the bank into the shallow water and started to walk toward the US side. Of course I was ready to swim. Everything in my backpack was placed inside tightly closed plastic bags. As the water rose slowly up my thighs, I scanned the gringo bank, looking for any movement, but there was no moon and the starlight only gave me shadows. I expected at any minute to be stabbed by flashlight beams, to hear Border Patrol agents shouting at me in Spanish, but I only heard the water rippling over a gravel bank.

     The bottom was hard packed sand and the current was only three or four miles per hour. I walked slowly, carefully placing my feet, and the water rose up to the center of my chest. I had come about fifty yards into the river and was about halfway across. Just as I was telling myself that it was time to swim, the water level slowly began to drop. I kept on walking and in no time I was standing in front of the American bank of the river, unable to get out, because it was steep, about three feet high, slippery and covered in thorns. I looked right and left, but the bank didn’t look any better in either direction.

I remembered the leather gloves in my backpack, found the plastic sack they were in and put them on. I grabbed a double handful of thorns and hauled myself up, only to slide back down the muddy bank into the river. Twice.

     So I crawled up the slope. Since I was grabbing thorns with both hands I couldn’t keep the stickers out of my face, but I made it. Then I faced a new problem: bamboo. Lots of tall bamboo stalks, ten feet tall, and so thick it was almost impossible to walk through. Since it was late November, the bamboo was also very dry and it crackled and popped with every attempt to take a step. I was sure that any Border Patrol agent within a half mile could hear me. I tried to be as quiet as possible, threading my feet slowly between the stalks of bamboo, but I soon gave it up. I couldn’t move and be quiet both so I decided to get it over as fast as possible and started crashing and popping through the canes. It was hard work and the temperature, even at midnight, was in the 80s. After fifteen minutes of sweating I broke through the cane and found myself back on the river bank. I was forced to admit something that a trained land surveyor should never have to admit. I had gone in a circle without knowing it.

     I had a GPS receiver, but the compass arrow on that model only works when you are walking at a normal speed. Bushwhacking through the cane I was moving too slowly. But of course I had a magnetic compass. I got it out of the pack and discovered that it did not have a luminous dial. I looked for the stars but inside the cane forest I couldn’t see the stars. Yes, I was beginning to have doubts about my planning for this escapade. I should have pulled out my flashlight, but I had decided not to bring one, on the grounds that I would be tempted to use it unnecessarily and it would give me away to the Border Patrol.

     After an interval of time that I won’t attempt to quantify, I came up with a plan. I took off my watch and held it upside down in my right hand. I held the compass in my left and when I pushed in the stem of my trusty Timex, the luminous dial allowed me to read my compass. After another fifteen minutes of snapping and popping, I emerged from the cane into the west Texas desert: sand, cactus and sparse, stunted mesquite bushes.

     I was at the bottom of a bluff, maybe two hundred feet high. I pulled myself up by grabbing handholds on mesquite or sage bushes and in no time I was standing on one of the few high points in that landscape, with a spectacular view of the river and the desert for miles in all directions. I turned to look west and could see a few pairs of red tail lights moving slowly north on Highway #2, three miles away in Mexico. The night was so still that I could hear the hissing of their tires on the asphalt. I didn’t have time to admire the view though, because I wanted to get as far away from the river as fast as I could. I took a compass reading to my destination, a small Texas town about 20 miles away and found a radio tower with a red blinking light on top that was right on line. I put my watch back on my left hand, started walking and fell off a cliff.

In Czarist Russia there were officially only three classes of people: nobility, clergy, and peasants. By the end of the 19^th century though, there were coming to be more and more individuals who didn’t fit into the recognized categories. The children of merchants for example, or Jews, those with some university education, or ethnic minorities… Quite a few people were falling between the cracks and they became known as razochinetski, meaning those of no clearly defined social class. The label could be derogatory. Sometimes the word just meant “middle-class intellectual.” The czarist officials didn’t trust these people because knowing their background didn’t tell you much about them. They might be either communists or nationalists. In an unsettling way, each razochinetz seemed to be self-defined.

Osip Mandelstam, the poet, proudly accepted the label and said that the biography of a razochinetz was his bookshelf. In other words, he was what he had read. In the United States, social classes are said to be fluid, but we still have razochinetski and a library can still serve as a biography of sorts, especially for self-educated people, who have complete freedom to choose what they read.

Nobody made me read any of the following books. It’s not a list of every book I’ve ever read, just those I still have copies of. Actually I don’t have them because they’re in storage in two different countries.

The first book I ever read was called “The Cozy Little Farm,” and I have a picture of myself holding it. The first adult book I read was “Edison” by Josephson. It was a bit over my head at age ten, but Edison was my hero and I still recall many scenes. One of the illustrations is a reproduction of a letter, showing Edison’s unique calligraphy, which he developed when he was a telegrapher. It was designed to be clear, beautiful and fast. I retrained myself to write in that style, and still do, more or less.

MY LIBRARY (What’s Left of It)

HISTORY

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

The Peninsular War, Jac Weller

Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale

A Nation Made by War, Geoffrey Perret

Eisenhower, Geoffrey Perret

The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer

The Second World War, John Keegan

The Boer War, Thomas Pakenham

The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger

Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, Simon S. Montefiore

Lincoln, Redeemer President, Alan Guelzo

The Impending Crisis, David M. Potter

A Narrative History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote

Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward S. Gibbon

Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose

The Reformation, Diarmuid MacCulloch

A Short History of the Argentines, Felix Luna

At Home Among the Patagonians, George Musters

The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgwood

Anabasis (The Upcountry March), Xenophon

The Conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz

The Conquest of Mexico, W.S. Prescott

Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence

The Command of the Ocean, N.A.M. Rodger

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman

The Face of Battle, John Keegan

Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman

Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest

Treason By The Book, Jonathan Spence

Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus trans. Grant

Army of the Caesars, Michael Grant

Adventures of Capt. Alonso Contreras, trans. Dallas

Memoirs, vol. I, George Kennan

The Pacific War—1931-1945, Saburo Ienaga

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose

FICTION, (novels, stories, drama)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

The Riverside Shakespeare (1 vol.)

A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols.), Anthony Powell

Sixteen Plays, Henrik Ibsen trans. Michael Meyer

Plays of Moliere, trans. Richard Wilbur

Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz

The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa

Walls Rise Up, George Sessions Perry

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler

The Third Bank of the River, Joao Guimaraes Rosa

Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan

Stories, Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. By Constance Garnett

The Plays of Chekhov, trans. by C. Garnett

New Grub Street, George Gissing

The Odd Women, George Gissing

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham

Moon & Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham

Child 44, Tom Rob Smith

The Secret Speech, Tom Rob Smith

Old Goriot, Balzac

Cousin Bette, Balzac

The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is The Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Sword of Honor, Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

Emma, Jane Austen

Animal Farm, George Orwell

1984, George Orwell

The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. von Goethe

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR

The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham

Pepys,The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Mr. Pepys, Samuel Ollard

Goethe, 2 vols. (so far) by Nicholas Boyle

Orwell, Jeffrey Meyers

Edmund Wilson, Jeffrey Meyers

Ibsen, Michael Meyer

Edison, Matthew Josephson

Alexander Pope, Maynard Mack

Chekhov, Donald Rayfield

Chekhov, Henri Troyat

Letters of Chekhov, ed. by Simon Karlinsky & M.H. Heim

Wellington, The Years of the Sword, Antonia Fraser

Witness, Sam Tannenhaus

Eugene O’Neill (2 vols.), Louis Schaeffer

Hindo Holiday, J.R.Ackerly

Henry James, (1 vol.) Leon Edel

W.Somerset Maugham, Ted Morgan

Italian Journey, J.W. von Goethe

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis

Daedalus Returned, Baron von der Heydte

Oscar, Peter J. Wilson

The Lives of Talleyrand, Crane Brinton

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi

The Reawakening, Primo Levi

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey

The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Christopher Benfey

Isaiah Berlin, David Ignatieff

Spinoza, Nadler

Chaucer, John Gardner

Chaucer, Donald Howard

Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tannenhaus

The Baburnama, Sultan Muhammad Babur, ed. Thackston

The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons

Parallel Lives, Plutarch

Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence

The Long Walk, Slawomir Rawicz

Comrade Valentine, Richard E. Rubenstein

Lords of the Sea, John R. Hale

Coyotes, Ted Conover

POETRY

The Odes of Horace, ed. by McClatchy

The Odes of Horace, trans. James Michie

Horace in English, ed. D.S. Carne Ross

The Complete Odes & Epodes of Horace, trans. W.G. Shepherd

Complete Odes & Satires of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander

Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Helen Vendler

Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur

Collected Poems of W.H. Auden

Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

Poems, Robert Frost

A Net of Fireflies, trans. Harold Stewart

Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron

Norton Anthology of Classical Literature, ed. Bernard Knox

Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz

Collected Poems of Houseman

Piers Plowman, Norton Edition

Poems of F.G. Tuckerman

Poems of Thomas Hardy

Poems of John Gay, 2 vols., ed. Dearing

Psalms of Sidney & Pembroke, ed. Rathnell

The Aeneid, Vergil trans. P.Dickinson

Complete Poetry of Mandelstam, trans. Raffel & Burago

Iliad, Homer trans. Fagles

The Divine Comedy, Dante trans. Ciardi

Complete Poems, Andrew Marvell

Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, R.M. Rilke trans. Poulin

Faust, Goethe trans. Kaufman

Complete Poetry, Alexander Pope

ESSAYS, CRITICISM

The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz

Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Paul Fussel

Cultural Amnesia, Clive James

Forwords and Afterwords, W.H. Auden

Essays Ancient and Modern, Bernard Knox

Essays, Letters, Journalism (4 vols.), George Orwell

Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky

Intellectuals, Paul Johnson

The Sense of Reality, Isaiah Berlin

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin

Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson

Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson

To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson

Essays, Montaigne trans. Frame

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Lionel Trilling

Distant Neighbors, Alan Riding

Mexican Etiquette & Ethics, Boye de la Mente

Narcocorrido, Elijah Wald

To Keep The Ball Rolling, Anthony Powell

Miscellaneous Verdicts, Anthony Powell

Under Review, Anthony Powell

True Tales From Another Mexico, Sam Quinones

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY

Jews, God & History, Max Dimont

Judaism, Roy Rosenberg

This Is My God, Wouk

Jews, Arthur Hertzberg

The Sabbath, A.J. Heschel

Farewell, España, Howard M. Sachar

The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz

A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson

The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell

The Book of Job, Stephen Mitchell

Jesus of Nazareth, J. Bornkamm

HISTORICAL FICTION

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault

The King Must Die, Mary Renault

Captain From Castille, Samuel Shellabarger

ENTERTAINMENTS

(thrillers, mysteries,

romances, adventure tales, etc.)

The Flashman series, George M. Fraser

The Travis McGee series, John D. McDonald

The Hornblower series, C.S. Forester

The Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian

The Bernie Rhodenbarr series, Lawrence Block

The Masters of Rome series, Colleen McCullough

The Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell

87^th Precinct series, Ed McBain

Arkady Renko series, Martin Cruz Smith

Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini

Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing

Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

Outsourced, R.J.Hillhouse

Con Ed, Mathew Klein

Citizen Vince, Jess Walter

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson

Six Suspects, Vikas Swarup

The Alibi, Joseph Kanon

The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Captain Alatrice, Arturo Perez-Reverte

ISLAM

The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones

The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai

Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ibn Warraq

The Media Relations Dept. of Hizbollah

Wishes You A Happy Birthday, Neil MacFarquhar

The Rise, Coming Fall and Corruption

of Saudi Arabia, Said K. Aburish

The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz

The Siege of Mecca, Yaroslav Trofimov

Islam, Robert Spencer

Terror’s Source, Vincenzo Olivetti

Hatred’s Kingdom, Dore Gold

The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright

The 9/11 Commission Report

Understanding Arabs, Margaret Nydell

Princess, Jean Sasson

Sultana’s Daughters, Jean Sasson

Sultana’s Circle, Jean Sasson

Now They Call Me Infidel, Nonie Darwish

Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott

Islam and Terrorism, Mark Gabriel

Wahabism, A Critical Essay, Hamid Algar

Islam, A Short History, Karen Armstrong

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

The Blood of Lambs, Kamal Saleem

Nadia’s Song, Soheir Kashoggi

]]> http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/06/08/my-library/feed/ 0 http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/06/04/non-serious-post/ http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/06/04/non-serious-post/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:07:27 +0000 admin http://edmundpickett.com/blog/?p=266  

     No one can be serious all the time, not even me, so this post will consist of a couple of silly riddles, a cute animal picture, and a poem.

Question: What is a metaphor?

Answer: It’s for all those times when only a meta will do.

Question: What is a catastrophe?

Answer: A catastrophe is what you have to pay after the catastro.

          As far as I know, those are original. They popped into my head while I was driving, but I might have heard them decades ago and they just decided to swim up to the surface of my consciousness. I’m sure there’s a website where you could solve the question.

          Continuing my non-serious theme, here’s the cute animal picture. Can you identify the animal?

          It’s a wild chinchilla. I took the photo in Machu Pichu. According to Wikipedia, they are crepuscular mammals, which I suppose means that they move around mainly at dusk. I snapped him around 11 a.m., so this guy was up very early. He was sitting in a gap in the ruins caused by an earthquake, about 15 ft. (5 meters) away, and didn’t seem to mind a bunch of tourists oohing and ahhing over him. The Incas are world famous for their large irregular stone construction techniques, but they also used coursed stone, with equal sized blocks, for some important buildings, though as you can see here, it is not as stable. The buildings made of irregular fitted blocks have not shifted at all.

          This is still a fairly short post, so I will bulk it up with a poem from my archives. The poem could be considered serious, but it’s short.

        Your Poised Hand

                        1

These clothes my former lover made

Fit even better as they fade.

                        2

There’s frequently a lot of dust

in what we think is solid sand.

In finding out you never trust

your eye or how it feels in hand.

To quench such curiosity,

fling it to the wind! You’ll see

the powder, born in falling grit,

billow, and abandon it.

Then you’ll know exactly just

how much rock and how much dust

were in that pile of so-called sand,

lately lying in your poised hand.

                        3

Exactly what you had will then

be known, and never known again.

The clothes she made are wearing thin.

           © 2009 Edmund Pickett

     (This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as

       you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)

The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall

                of Saudi Arabia……….by Said K. Aburish 

The Siege of Mecca…………..Yaroslav Trofimov

Terror’s Source……….Vincenzo Olivetti

Hatred’s Kingdom……….Dore Gold

The Saudis…………..Sandra Mackey

          Saudi Arabia has few friends in the world and that includes the muslim world. The al-Saud family owns the country–every lock, stock and barrel of oil. Since they control the muslim holy sites including Mecca, they believe that they can define Islam for the entire world. However, there are few muslims outside the borders of Saudi Arabia who accept the Saudi version of Islam. This simple fact is not widely appreciated in the non-muslim world because of all the money the Sauds throw around. They have a lot of cash to play with and that gold buys friends, lots of them. They buy countries, newspapers, TV stations, newspapers, journalists and European members of parliament. Where they cannot buy friends, they buy silence. As a result, their self-image is accepted uncritically in Europe and the United States. They are thought to represent all muslims, whereas in fact they are despised by most of the muslim world.

          Said K. Aburish, a Lebanese journalist, considers Abdul Azziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the country that he modestly named after himself, and all his descendants to be corrupt degenerates and a disgrace to Islam. Published in 1995, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud washes all the kingdom’s dirty linen in public, and though the fall predicted by Aburish hasn’t happened yet, after reading his indictment, it’s hard to believe the princes can last much longer. By the way, there are over twenty thousand princes and not one of them has to work for a living. That sounds like an incredible number, but Ibn Saud, the first king, who died in 1953, had 37 sons and they have all been reproducing with similar dedication ever since. You do the math. No one knows how many daughters the old man had because no one kept score. Girls don’t count, but I would guess that their sons are princes. It’s an exponential dynasty.

          The financial corruption within this obscenely rich gang of hedonists is almost impossible to believe but Aburish’s charges are confirmed by many other writers. It’s well to remember though, that from the Saud’s point of view, there is no corruption in their country. Since they own everything and everybody, whatever they do is right. When they are not trying to win the most male babies contest, the princes scheme to have their monthly allowances raised. Like every royal family in history, they are clueless, ignorant, arrogant and useless. Said Aburish also indicts them for religious hypocrisy, drinking alcohol and leaving the country during Ramadan, the month of fasting.

    Since Aburish is a working journalist, he knows all the dirty details of how the Saudis bribe journalists in the Arab world. He knows who’s on the take, which is basically every writer in every Muslim country. There are two levels of payment. For the basic rate, you only have to avoid criticizing Saudi Arabia. If you want the big bucks though, you have to write articles actually praising the wise rulers of the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia distributes foreign aid to Muslim countries also, and that comes with strings. Countries which want to stay on the dole have to control all media within their borders, in other words, no criticism of you-know-who.

          Their reach extends to Europe as well. Aburish claims that they have journalists and politicians on their payroll in all the major countries, a belief shared by many people, although hard proof so far is scarce. However, there is no compelling reason to expect that they would avoid in Europe the tactics that work so well for them in the Muslim world.

          Hatred’s Kingdom,by Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, details all the ways in which Saudis pay for terrorist acts all over the world. The author writes passionately and well, but then he and his country are in the center of the bullseye. After you read it (and you should) you will never again feel good about seeing our President shaking hands with a Saudi king.

Terror’s Source: The Ideology of Salafism and Its Consequences
Vincenzo Olivetti, an Italian Muslim, traces the theological connections between all the radical Muslim groups, which fall under the general heading of Salafist. They have their shades of difference, but all look back to Ibn Tamiya, a viciously intolerant medieval scholar, and they all reject the four schools of Islamic Law, which over the centuries have placed restrictions on jihad. If you can imagine a group of radical orthodox Jews who reject the Talmud, you can get a handle on the fanatics who call themselves Salafist. Each one of them claims the right to be his own rabbi, as it were. This leaves them perfectly free to cherry pick the Koran for the most violent verses, and to ignore all the others that counsel tolerance. Of course the four schools of Islamic Law really end up in the same place, since they observe the doctrine of abrogation, which states that when two verses in the Koran appear to conflict, the latter revelation abrogates, or cancels, the earlier. Unfortunately, in the Koran, the tolerant verses are all early and the violent verses are later.

          It makes depressing reading, but it should be remembered that the Salafists are a small minority in the Muslim world. Financial support from Saudi Arabia gives them a bigger voice than they would have otherwise. It is heartening to know that they do have opposition among muslims, including Vincenzo Olivetti.

         Wahhabism: A Critical Essay by Hamid Algar, is a short, focused look at the legacy of Muhammad ibn-Abd al-Wahab (born 1703), the Muslim scholar who founded the sect that has become the official religion of Saudi Arabia.

          Al-Wahab, who wrote very little, made almost no impression on his contemporaries, with the exception of a sheik named Saud, who offered him protection in return for fatwas, or religious rulings, justifying whatever Saud felt like doing. Most Muslims today consider that this was a bargain between two devils, but it has had long lasting consequences, since the descendants of the two men are still honoring the pact. The Ottoman Empire tried to crush the Saudi/Wahabi threat several times, and appeared to have succeeded, but always some new descendant of Saud charges out of the desert, backed up by followers of al-Wahab. The most recent one, Abdul Azziz ibn Saud, founded the current kingdom, which he modestly named after himself, in 1932. Every king since his death in 1953, has been one of his sons.

          Hamid Algar does not even try to conceal his scorn for al-Wahab, and the jabs are sometimes funny, even though this is basically a work of comparative theology. For a non-Muslim, it’s hard to see a great deal of difference between Wahabism and normal Sunni Islam, but those details do not seem small to the true believers. As a case in point, small theological details have caused a lot of wars among Christians over the years. Basically, al-Wahab objected to some customs that had arisen among Muslims that he thought were forbidden by the Koran, such as pilgrimages to the tombs of famous scholars, artistic decoration in mosques, and the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday. Sunni Muslims tolerate all those practices, and the Shiites allow a great deal more, but the Wahabi view is the only one allowed in Saudi Arabia. It is important to realize though, that if Saudi petrodollars disappeared tomorrow, Wahabism would return to what it was before 1932: an obscure footnote to the history of Islam.

          Algar studied Islam at Cambridge and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. The book also includes some jabs at the United States and Israel, which are irrelevant to his subject, but serve the useful purpose of labeling the author and identifying his prejudices. I’m sure his opinions on Wahabism are worth taking seriously.

      Sandra Mackey lived in Saudi Arabia for several years in the eighties when the country was perhaps changing faster than any country has ever changed. Before then it was not medieval, it was pre-medieval. With perhaps more money per person than any country has ever had, the king decided to modernize the country, more or less overnight. It’s hard to say who was most disoriented, the foreign workers who poured in, or the locals.

          In The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom, Mackey describes her part of this whirlwind, with a very keen eye for the human dimension. She knew very little about Islam before arriving in the kingdom and never shows much interest in religion. This doesn’t harm her book at all. Her focus is always on the people and since Islam affects every aspect of daily life there, the effect of religion is always evident. She tells her story like all good travel writers, by anecdote. Certainly much has changed since she left, but I’m sure the things she noticed: the oppression of women; the privileges of the royals; and the unimaginable corruption have not abated at all.

          In 1979, while Sandra Mackey was in the country, hundreds of fanatics seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in Islam. To the Saudi people and to Muslims worldwide, this event could be compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor put together. The event was so embarrassing to the royal family that they instituted a total media blackout. As a result, there was very little coverage at the time and the attack has never been widely known in the non-Muslim world. The repercussions, however, still affect the entire planet. For several days after the takeover, the King was paralyzed. The Muslim world was frantic for news of what was going on, but the blackout continued. The king couldn’t order an armed response because it is forbidden to use force of any kind in the Grand Mosque. After a great deal of discussion, the Ulema (the leading Islamic scholars) finally issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that allowed Saudi soldiers to retake the mosque, but they drove a hard bargain. One of their demands was that the Saudi government start spending a huge percentage of the country’s oil income to promote Wahabism throughout the world. On that day began the avalanche of hate-filled propaganda that is still suffocating Islam in every country. Books, websites, new mosques, orphanages, schools (madrassas) began to multiply in every country on earth, not just the Muslim ones. Most dangerous of all are the salaries paid to the mullahs or imams. In every country on earth, a mullah willing to toe the Saudi line receives a subsidy. It can double his income. Sometimes it is his only income. And the Wahabi message is very clear. Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys and must all be killed. Israel must be wiped off the map. Western countries must be taken over by Islam. All criticism of Islam anywhere must stop. Violence and lies are acceptable if they work.

          This world-wide propaganda campaign resembles in many ways the propaganda struggle during the cold war between Russia and the United States, but there are two glaring differences. One, the Saudis are spending a lot more money than the Russians ever did, and Two, the United States is not fighting back this time. Not surprisingly, we are losing badly. To gain clarity on this issue, it is necessary to know how it began.

          In The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine, Yaroslav Trofimov, a veteran journalist for the Wall Street Journal, uncovers the astounding facts about the battle that changed Islam forever, facts that the Saudi government is still trying to suppress. He talked to soldiers who fought for the army and even found a few survivors from among the rebels, most of whom were beheaded. It is a gripping story of brutal close combat that lasted weeks, most of it in the endless tunnels under the Grand Mosque. At the time, because the Saudis were saying nothing, disinformation predominated, mainly coming from Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini announced that the United States and Israel were behind the attack. This was of course false, but mobs all over the Islamic world attacked U.S. embassies and the one in Pakistan was burned. The fact that nearly all the rebels were Saudi citizens who considered their royal family to be corrupt degenerates is still deeply embarrassing to the the Saudi government. Non-Muslims need to know this story and Trofimov tells it very well.

Books on Islam, part 3

The Two Faces of Islam
by Stephen Schwartz

          Except for the part that approves of mass murder, this is a valuable book. I recommend it highly. Of course, you also have to overlook that the author, while praising Islam, fails to mention that he is a muslim himself. But I repeat, this is a valuable book, because it contains a wealth of dirt on Saudi Arabia.

          It’s not that Stephen Schwartz actually hides his Islamic affiliation. The first sixty-five pages of the book are a short history of Islam which not even Osama bin Laden could possibly object to. In fact, this section is embarrassingly childish missionary propaganda. The most absurd Muslim myths and legends are presented as simple historical truth. If you have ever read a book on the lives of Catholic saints, written for ten year-olds, you know the flavor of this material. Muhammad was the only perfect man, he was the soul of kindness, Muslims won their battles because hordes of angels fought beside them, etc. Muhammad takes a captive to be his sex slave, after murdering her father and husband and naturally, she falls deeply in love with him. Muhammad never did anything wrong and if he did, everyone else was doing it too, so that makes it okay. He was perfect except when he wasn’t and then he is excused because fourteen hundred years ago Arabia was a barbarous place. And Schwartz uses strategic omission as well. He trots out the verse from the Koran that says there should be no compulsion in religion but fails to mention the doctrine of abrogation, accepted by all schools of Islamic law, which holds that when two verses of the Koran appear to be in conflict, the latter revelation abrogates, or cancels the earlier one. This is no minor point, since the compassionate, tolerant verses are all early and the violent, intolerant verses are all later. This kind of tactical silence is standard with all Muslim propagandists, such as Karen Armstrong, but Stephen Schwartz vaults into a class by himself when he whitewashes the massacre ordered by Muhammad following the Battle of the Trench. Following is Schwartz’s account. I have inserted numerals which I will use to organize my counter-arguments.

           “ In 627, Muslim power was again victorious over Mecca…after which the men of the tribe of Qurayzah (1) were offered mercy (2) if they accepted Islam, but they were willing to die (3) rather than surrender their faith.”

          “Muhammad’s treatment of these groups has led some…critics to accuse him of anti-Jewish prejudice (4). However, he was fighting a religious war (5) in a part of the world without law, (6) leading men whose minds were illuminated with the truth of the one true God, (7) and he had against him his own kin and townsmen. (8) Ambiguities in loyalty could no longer be tolerated. (9) But it has also been observed that Muhammad fought people over their attitudes, not their beliefs.” (10)

1.     The men of the tribe of Qurayzah who were captured numbered some 300 (Schwartz), 600 (Wikipedia), or 1300 (Armstrong). Qurayzah was a Jewish tribe. Muhammad attacked them because they didn’t believe he was a prophet.

2.     “(they) were offered mercy”.  No, they weren’t. They were given a choice of conversion or death. Mercy is unconditional, and in the earlier verses of the Koran (later to be cancelled) Muhammad says many beautiful things about mercy. By a wonderful coincidence, on page 2 of this same book, we read that in Europe, around 1000 A.D., “Germans, Nordics, Slavs and Baltic peoples were forcibly baptized…Those who resisted were murdered or driven to flight.” So when Christians kill those who refuse to abandon the religion of their ancestors, Stephen Schwartz considers it murder, but when Muhammad slaughters a thousand prisoners for the same reason it is something quite different. The word ‘murder’ is strangely missing.

3.     “willing to die” makes it sound like the men of Qurayzah were tired of living, which is unlikely, but Schwartz wants us to think that they preferred death because they were too hard-hearted to accept mercy, which “was offered.” This use of the passive voice allows Schwartz to leave Muhammad’s name out of the sentence.

4.     “to accuse (Muhammad) of anti-Jewish prejudice” Schwartz is definitely low-balling the non-Muslim opinion here. More common accusations would be genocide, mass murder, anti-semitism, crimes against humanity, bloodlust, sadism, etc.

5.     “he was fighting a religious war” True, and it was a war Muhammad started.

6.     “in a part of the world without law” This is completely false. There were laws of warfare in Arabia at that time, accepted by all tribes, which Muhammad broke whenever he felt like it. If he heard a rumor that another tribe was thinking about breaking a treaty with him, that was all he needed to attack first. One of the most obvious facts about Muhammad is that he would break any law or tradition whenever it was in his interest. If criticized too much he would concoct a revelation afterwards to justify himself.

7.     “leading men whose minds were illuminated…”

When you read this sentence, did you suffer whiplash from the 180 degree change of subject? What do Muhammad’s soldiers have to do with this? Is Schwartz trying to deflect blame? Is he implying that Muhammad wanted to be nice but that the soldiers wanted blood and Muhammad was afraid to deny them? But all Muslim accounts stress that the soldiers were fanatically loyal to their prophet; they would do whatever he ordered with no questions. Again, I have to ask, how did these soldiers, with their illuminated minds, end up in the middle of this argument? Elsewhere in his works, Stephen Schwartz, a longtime journalist, gives abundant evidence that he understands the concept of paragraph unity, so what is going on here?

     I’m taking a wild guess, but I think that while he was writing this whitewash, the stress of doublethink, of self-induced schizophrenia finally became too much for Schwartz. He wanted to defend his beloved prophet, but some long repressed part of his mind realized he should not be giving Muhammad a free pass here. Because the horror didn’t end with the murder of a thousand men. Their wives and children were sold into slavery. A Jewish tribe of at least four thousand people was erased. That would have been one trainload to Auschwitz. It was genocide. And so, while trying to excuse it, his mind rebelled and he discovered that his fingers were typing something about soldiers with illuminated minds.

8.     “he had against him his own kin and townsmen.” This is completely irrelevant. After the Battle of the Trench Muhammad was the evident master of Arabia. It didn’t matter than some of his neighbors and relatives were still against him. The disarmed prisoners of the Qurayzah were no threat to him. He could have chosen mercy but he preferred vengeance.

9.     “Ambiguities in loyalty could no longer be tolerated.” This is the stupidest and yet most sinister sentence in the entire paragraph. Stupid, because ambiguity, or uncertainty, was not the problem. The loyalties of the Qurayzah were crystal clear. They were loyal to Moses, not Muhammad. Sinister, because here Schwartz revives one of the oldest slanders against the Jews. For thousands of years bigots in Europe who were irritated by the Jews’ attachment to their ancient nation of Israel concluded that they couldn’t really be equally loyal to Germany, or France or Poland. In the Soviet Union the codeword was “cosmopolitanism.” In fact Jews have always been the most law abiding people in every country where they have lived.

10.“But is has been observed that Muhammad fought people over their attitudes, not beliefs.” Really? And who has observed that? Has Stephen Schwartz observed that? No, because two sentences earlier, in the very same paragraph, we read that “(Muhammad) was fighting a religious war.” But now some nameless group of others appears (miraculously?), speaking in the passive tense, to disagree. No, it wasn’t really about religion at all

     I apologize that my refutation is many times longer than the paragraph I am disagreeing with, but it takes a lot of disassembling to unpack all the lies, evasions and dishonesty packed into those few sentences. The thought processes of a true believer are tortuous and the motives incomprehensible, thankfully, to most people, but here we can see just how hard a zealot will work to erase the truth and defend the indefensible.

     Stephen Schwartz is not obliged to feel any sympathy for those murdered men and those women and children sold as slaves. In fact, his religion obligates him to believe that they got what they deserved, because Muslims believe that Muhammad was the only perfect human being. His actions cannot be questioned, only praised.

         But I said that I recommend this book and I am dead serious. Just skip the first sixty-five pages. Following that is a wonderful two hundred page indictment of Saudi Arabia. For that, Stephen Schwartz’s religion is a plus. All the best exposés of Saudi Arabia are written by Muslims who despise the Wahabi heresy of Islam which is the official religion in the kingdom created by Abdul Azziz ibn Saud.

           It was in Bosnia, where he was working as a journalist, that Schwartz converted to the Sufi, or mystical tendency of Islam. Though Sufis are sometimes described as pacifist, they have produced some notable warriors, particularly in the Caucasus. Because of his Sufi connections, Schartz can describe in detail the way that Wahabi zealots, financed from Saudi Arabia, have tried to hijack the struggle for autonomy in Bosnia and Kosovo and also the war against the Russians in Chechnya. In both cases, the Wahabis behave like the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War; they purge everyone who disagrees with them. Then they destroy the beautiful ancient mosques, replace them with Saudi-style big boxes, devoid of all decoration, and, to make themselves even more hated, they never stop telling the local Muslims that they don’t know how to pray properly.

     Schwartz also details Saudi support for terror around the world. He tells the story of the infamous telethon in Saudi Arabia that raised 109 million dollars for the families of suicide bombers, and adds, “The Saudi cleric who hosted the telethon, Shaykh Saad al-Buraik, preached in a mosque in Riyadh, calling for the enslavement of the Jewish women of Israel, once Palestinian victory was achieved. Referring to Jews as ‘monkeys,’ al-Baraik declared, ‘Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have mercy or compassion toward the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?’ Al-Baraik was with Prince (now King) Abdullah on a visit to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April, 2002.”

           That last fact, about the visit to Crawford, is the kind of thing that non-muslim journalists always miss. Muslims, like Stephen Schwartz, are much more aware of the gap between Saudi propaganda and Saudi reality.

           I’m not sure why Schwartz chose that particular passage from al-Baraik’s sermon to quote. He couldn’t possibly disagree on theological grounds. Everything al-Baraik says is ordinary Muslim doctrine, taken from the life of Muhammad, such as his behavior at the Battle of the Trench. Captive women were an important motivator for Muhammad and his men. Dead soldiers expected sex slaves in Paradise, and those who survived battle were rewarded with the female relatives of those they had just killed.

           The Two Faces of Islam also contains useful information on Saudi corruption of higher education in the non-Muslim world. The Kingdom has been endowing Muslim studies programs at colleges and universities all over the world, including Ivy League schools in the U.S. Students in all these programs lobby for so-called “hate speech” codes to give Islam a privileged position on campus, totally exempt from discussion by non-believers, and they lead noisy protests against anyone who tries to speak about Islam or terrorism. This is very scary and depressing, because these people find willing allies among the left-wing, so-called progressive intellectuals. Being nice to the Muslims then becomes part of the reigning political correctness.

     I repeat, this is a valuable book. It took courage to write, because the Saudis have a lot of money and they fight back. They bribe journalists to spread slander, they encourage ‘spontaneous’ acts of violence, they block websites, etc. Stephen Schwartz has refused to be intimidated for a long time. He continues to tell the truth about the Wahabis, publishing in the few magazines willing to risk Saudi organized advertising boycotts, such as The Weekly Standard. If only our politicians would pay attention….

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          The apology (or defense) is  Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong, a former nun, who previously wrote a best selling biography of God. In her telling, Mohammed is the very soul of compassion, who brought enlightenment to the pagans of Arabia and improved the status of women. In this book and also in Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, Armstrong’s general thesis is that Mohammed never did anything wrong, and if he did, everyone else was doing it too, and in Europe at that time they were even worse. Seriously, this is the level of her analysis. In her spiritual autobiography, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darknessshe describes her seven years as a nun, an experience which she says left her scarred emotionally. It is difficult to summarize her current religious beliefs, but basically she thinks all the great religious traditions are trying to approach the same God, and if you don’t take what they say literally, they are equally valid. She says that compassion is the supreme virtue and the one we must honor when speaking of anyone else’s religion. She believes this requires her to accept at face value everything Muslims say about Muhammad and Islam, so she accepts without question every dodgy excuse Muslims have ever made to excuse the barbarous cruelties of their prophet. For instance, Muhammad had two concubines, more correctly known as sex slaves, one of whom he enslaved after defeating her tribe in battle, and then executing her husband and father. Armstrong says, “The emancipation of women was a project dear to the prophet’s heart.” And on the same page she adds, “…Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company of women.” (Islam: A Short History, pg. 67) In short, Karen Armstrong might as well be a muslim missionary.

     However, if you can’t bear to think ill of anyone and sincerely want to believe that the billion muslims of the world follow a religion of love, then Karen Armstrong should be your guide. While she doesn’t admit to being a convert to Islam (and I doubt that she is) she is careful to say nothing that could possibly offend even the most moderate muslim. Miracles and legends that would strain the credibility of a gullible ten-year old are related by Armstrong as obvious truth. This kind of self-censorship is common among some writers on Islam. It is often presented as compassion towards the sensitivities of others, but in reality is nothing but hypocrisy. A real scholar of Islam, Maxime Rodinson, explains what seems to me a more honest position as follows,

 
          “May any muslims who happen to read these lines forgive my plain speaking. For them the Koran is the book of Allah and I respect their faith. But I do not share it and I do not wish to fall back, as many orientalists have done, on equivocal phrases to disguise my real meaning. This may perhaps be of assistance in remaining on good terms with individuals and governments professing Islam; but I have no wish to deceive anyone. Muslims have every right not to read my book or to acquaint themselves with the ideas of a non-muslim, but if they do so, they must expect to find things put forward there which are blasphemous to them. It is evident that I do not believe that the Koran is the book of Allah.”

It is worth mentioning that many violent jihadist websites recommend Karen Armstrong’s books. I can’t help but wonder if she has ever stopped to think how miserable her life would have been if she had been born in any muslim country.

The contrary view on Islam is given in Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq, a readable guide to every argument ever made against Islam. The author was raised as a muslim, then became an atheist. He attacks every claim made by muslims about their faith and leaves not one stone standing on another. The Koran is not infallible, not the word of God, it is not even good Arabic. Mohammed was a mass murderer, a pedophile and a fraud. Islam despises women and hates science. If this sounds harsh, you should be aware that all the facts presented by Ibn Warraq come from canonical Muslim sources. I believe his arguments are irrefutable and that they should be read by anyone who wants to discuss Islam in public. Aside from the fraudulent nature of the Koran and the reprehensible character of Mohammed, Ibn Warraq discusses two important areas which are commonly shrouded in myths: Science and Women.

It is widely believed that there was a period of time lasting several centuries when Islamic civilization was exceptionally tolerant of other religions and that there was a great flourishing of science and art. Ibn Warraq debunks this myth completely. Of course there are some grains of truth around which the myth is built. There were some great scholars in Muslim countries who preserved manuscripts of classic Greek philosophers and mathematicians, manuscripts which would otherwise have been lost to humanity. However, most of these men were not muslims. They were Christians or Jews who lived in Muslim countries. Their names are Arabic, because they were born in Arab countries and Arabic was their native tongue, but they were not muslim. They and the few muslims who shared their interests were not actually tolerated, in the usual meaning of that word. Almost every one of them was persecuted, some were executed, some were exiled. Others had to write in allegorical language or leave their works to be published posthumously. If these men survived unscathed, it was by accident, or because they lived in seclusion. In every case, their accusers were the leading Islamic scholars of the day, who denounced them for the simple crime of reading non-Islamic books. It has long been a fundamental belief in the muslim world that all books written by non-muslims are useless and probably dangerous. The argument given is that if by chance the book contains material that agrees with Islam it is redundant and therefore superfluous. If it contains material contrary to Islam then it is evil. This single idea is responsible for the cultural egotism and widespread ignorance in the muslim world. A few years ago a United Nations study counted all the books translated into Arabic in one year. It was equal to the number of books translated into modern Greek. Since the Arab countries have 30 times the population of Greece, these majority muslim countries clearly suffer from a profound lack of curiosity about the rest of the world. This, as much as anything, explains the widespread ignorance, lack of development, and intolerance among muslims. Simply put, Islam is hostile to all education except the study of the Koran and other Islamic texts. There never was and never will be a great age of science in the muslim world until this self-imposed narrow mindedness disappears.

As Ernest Renan observed, we do not give the Catholic Inquisition the credit for the works of Galileo, so why should we give Islam the credit for the achievements of a few scholars whose lives were lived in constant fear of Islamic persecution?

Ibn Warraq also gives a full account of the status of women in Islam, throughout history and throughout the Muslim world today. I thought I knew most of the indictment here, but I was wrong. The truth is much more horrible. Reading the catalog of horrors against women committed in the name of Islam is very much like reading about the Nazi death camps, and it must be emphasized again and again, the misogyny starts with Mohammed. It’s there in the Koran. It’s in the hadith, the biographical sketches of the prophet’s life, where it is obvious that to Mohammed, women were not fully human in the same way that men are. For Mohammed, women were nothing but sex toys. Hatred of women is not a perversion of Islam, it is Islam. For example, Al-Ghazali, an Islamic scholar sometimes called the second greatest muslim after the prophet, was a sick misogynist. Ibn Warraq provides a short summary of Al-Ghazali’s pronouncements on women, and reading it, I hope, will make you throw up. And the story never gets better. In every century and in every Islamic country, women have been treated like livestock.

For additional current information on the lives of women in Islamic countries, see my next post,”Books on Islam, pt. 2″ which contains reviews of “Infidel” by Ayan Hirsi Ali, “Now They Call Me Infidel” by Nonie Darwish and the books by Jean Sasson, “Princess,” “Sultana’s Circle,” and “Sultana’s Children,” and others.

Jumbling down the street beneath       

umbrellas of colored cellophane,

these turned-up crescents full of teeth

are children, blooming in the rain.

Like stained glass mushrooms come alive,

whose powers at last are unconfined,

this motley squad of four or five

is death on sight to a gloomy mind.

Squealing, splashing, wet as snails–

    their mothers dressed them warm today

    and now they all drag furry tails–

    the coats that Spring should pack away.

Sunshine erupts, with rare bad taste,

baking the splash right out of those

in whom a sudden hope was placed.

Betrayed, they drip, and pout and pose.

Their shelters folded turn to swords,

with all hands now repelling boarders.

Past squealing quickly, they now use words,

and some now give, and some take, orders.

Old Gloomy would lose heart at this,

but sees a dark cloud on the way

and stands his ground, afraid to miss

the birth of laughter twice in a day.

I wait.  Quite soon that shriveled plume

wrapped round each fighting stick will bloom.

They’ll play.  Old me will stand in thrall,

and water will fall and fall and fall.

© 2009  Edmund Pickett

       (This poem may be copied or forwarded as long as

          you retain the copyright notice and author’s name)

As If Led

                                       I

Spilled blood dies

long before it dries.

With no breath

to flow toward it’s death

comes on fast.

Each cell breathes its’ last

and all stop

as life leaves each drop.

I forget

that what’s now just wet

was once warm;

this splat had a form–

a branched view

of all it flowed through,

blue then red,

circling as if led

by a song

’til something all wrong

slacks the stream.

What leaves then like steam

is all one:

heat, shape, direction.

                                      II

Split in three,

blood’s integrity

eludes us.

More is dangerous

to our lives

than glass shards or knives,

but damage

is harder to gauge.

Shapeless form,

heat that doesn’t warm,

red and blue

circles are a few

of what we

bleed through quietly,

wondering at

the simple fact that

lives are spilled

long before they’re killed.

©  2009  Edmund Pickett

                 (This poem may be copied or forwarded as long as

                  you retain the copyright notice and author’s name)