Worlds Apart

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Karen Armstrong, "Islam: A Short History" (Modern Library, 223 pages, $19.95)
Armstrong, "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet" (HarperSanFrancisco, $15.00)
Bernard Lewis, "The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years" (Touchstone/Simon&Schuster, 433 pages, $16.00)
Geneive Abdo, "No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam" (Oxford, 223 pages, $25.00)

Lewis' "The Middle East" and Armstrong's "Islam" offer readers two different ways of understanding the Middle East. Lewis' approach is sociological and political, tracing the development of economies, the careers of politicians and the lives of warriors. Armstrong's approach is religious — she presents a history of the Middle East through the prism of the birth and spread of Islam; in her book "Muhammad", she embarks on a similar task, exploring the development of Arab political and spiritual consciousness though the life of the Prophet.

Home: The People of the Book Part 1: Bin Laden: The Man Who Wasn't There "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America" by Yossef Bodansky "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden" by Peter L. Bergen Part 2: The Rise and Fall of the Taliban Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid "Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan" by Michael Griffin "The Taliban: War, Religion and the New Order in Afghanistan" by Peter Marsden Part 3: Worlds Apart Karen Armstrong, "Islam: A Short History" Armstrong, "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet" Bernard Lewis, "The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years" Geneive Abdo, "No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam" Part 4: History Repeats Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes" Donald Barr Chidsey, "The Wars in Barbary: Arab Piracy and the Birth of the United States Navy" John Lukacs, "Five Days in London May 1940

Armstrong writes crisply and with a strong point of view; she isn't given to lyrical description, but she often pauses in her narrative to present her personal take on some social or cultural matter. "Muhammad" is a stronger tome than the slight "Islam"; the former is rich with telling anecdotes, while the latter seems overly packed with superfluous facts. Throughout her work, Armstrong argues that Islam has been largely misunderstood and vilified in the West, and that many of the characteristics attributed to it are gross exaggerations or cultural propaganda. "Anti-semitism is a Christian vice," Armstrong asserts at one point. "Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into Arabic such virulently anti-Semitic texts as the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', because they had no such traditions of their own."

Recently, pundits and late night talk show hosts in the West have had a good deal of sport with the fact that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda operatives have been hiding out in caves. It's been viewed in the West as a sign of almost pathetic backwardness. But Armstrong, in the opening to "Islam" describes how the prophet Muhammad used to retire to a cave at the summit of Mount Hira, just outside of Mecca, where he would pray, fast and give alms to the poor. It was in this region, on the night of 17 Ramadan, that Muhammad first received the revelation of the Quran. Surely, as Bin Laden hides in his mountain caves, he and his followers are aware of the symbolic and historical resonance of their geography.

Armstrong also works hard to debunk the notion that Islam is a misogynist faith. "The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet's heart," Armstrong writes. "The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet's wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house. These customs were adopted some three or four generations after the Prophet's death." We also learn, in Armstrong's work, that the prophet's first wife, Khadija, was older than him, that she was a successful merchant with a career, and that she proposed marriage to him. According to Armstrong, the Muslim women of the prophet's time enjoyed freedoms unheard of in many of today's Islamic states: "The women of the first ummah [Muslim community] in Mecca took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside men in battle." It's clear, then, that the masters of the Taliban, with their fundamentalists laws forcing women out of public life, were conjuring an Islamic past that existed only in their own heads.

In her book "No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam," Geneive Abdo, a correspondent in Iran for The Guardian and The Economist, questions the interest many Westerners have had about the place of women in Muslim countries in modern times. Abdo writes: "During my periodic travels in the West, I was struck how editors, publishers, literary agents and friends wanted to discuss virtually nothing but my impressions of the status of women under Islam. Most of their questions were based on the assumption that Islamic practices were forced on women, too helpless and too powerless in male-dominated societies to control their own destinies. No topic aroused as much interest and visceral emotion as veiling. When I explained that veiling was practices voluntarily by an increasing number of Muslim women, Westerners often offered a counterexplanation — if veiling was in fact by choice, then women certainly were being brainwashed by Muslim extremists."

Lewis' economic take on the development of the Middle East can be summarized in two words: coffee and sugar. Writes Lewis: "The European agricultural revolution found no parallel in the countries of the Middle East; still less the European industrial revolution." Coffee and sugar are symbolic of the failure of Middle Eastern economies to keep up with the pace of the modern world. Writes Lewis: "Both coffee and the sugar used to sweeten it were first introduced to Europe from the Middle East...by the end of the eighteenth century, when a Turk or Arab drank a cup of coffee, both the coffee and the sugar had been grown in the European colonies and imported by Europeans." Three major Islamic empires came to power in the late 15th and early 16th centuries: the Safavid Empire in Iran, the Moghul Empire in India and the Ottoman Empire in Syria, Anatolia (the part of what is now Turkey covering Asia Minor), Arabia, and North Africa. By the 18th century the first two had faded away, and the last, the Ottoman, was on its last legs. The Ottoman Empire lost ground to the West, in part, because it lacked the natural resources, such as timber, to keep up with the rapidly industrializing nations of the West. And what few economic inroads countries in the Middle East made were often sabotaged or thwarted by European colonial interests. And finally, especially in the case of the Ottomans, Turkish leaders, who did try to institute some forward-thinking ideas, in the end could not overcome the enormous cultural barriers to the acceptance and promulgation of new ideas and modern methodologies. Lewis quotes a distinguished Turkish historian as saying "The scientific wave broke against the dikes of literature and jurisprudence."

Armstrong breaks, from time to time, from her careful tracing of the religious history of Islam to offer her opinions on how economic realities have shaped the Middle East. She argues that while technology has resulted in higher living standards in the West, in the Third World it has prompted many to question the very meaning of their lives. Writes Armstrong: "The modern spirit that developed in the West is fundamentally different. In Europe and America it had two main characteristics: innovation and autonomy (the modernizing process was punctuated in Europe and America by declarations of independence on the political, intellectual and social fronts)." However, Armstrong argues "in the developing world, modernity has been accompanied not by autonomy but a loss of independence and national autonomy."

Is there some middle ground for the Middle East? Is the only choice available between accepting Western-style modernity (and the cultural ruin that implies) and backwards-looking fundamentalist xenophobia? Benjamin R. Barber, in his book "Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World" argues that today's captains of Western industry are more powerful than ever before. Writes Barber: "In the nineteenth century, the great monopolies in oil, steel, coal, and the railways were finally dismantled by vigorous government anti-trust regulation. But Michael Eisner is no Rockefeller and Bill Gates is no Vanderbuilt and Steven Spielberg is no Carnegie. Eisner, Gates, and Spielberg are far more powerful, for theirs is power not over oil, steel and railroads — mere muscles of our modern industrial bodies — but over pictures, information and ideas — the very sinews of our postmodern soul."

Abdo holds that there is a middle path for the Middle East. In "No God But God" she writes: "The national struggle under way in Egypt cannot be simplistically classified as a clash between 'Jihad' and 'McWorld,' as the scholar Benjamin R. Barber has described the confrontation he sees between Islam and modernity. Instead the goal is a marriage between the two."

Abdo cites the example of Egypt's medical union, which represents hundreds of thousands of middle class professionals. When the Islamist leaders of the union designed a health insurance program for their members, they used an American model, but they tailored it to fit their moral and religious beliefs. Abdo quotes the architect of the plan as saying "Our insurance program is American because we have instituted a payment system for those who suffer from terminal diseases, such as cancer. It is Islamic because we never cut off the payments, no matter what happens. We keep paying until the patients are either cured or dead." Abdo implies that society at large could learn a lesson from that approach. The patient isn't dead yet.