The Irish invented surfing? Yeah, right, and Jamaicans gave us bobsledding. But wait: the Irish have waves. Big ones. The wall of water known as the North Atlantic slams into the wildly west coast of Ireland and makes waves. Really big ones.

Waveriders argues that Ireland really does have a claim to a central place in the history of surfing. And, based not only the majesty of those west coast waves but the fact that the messiah of the modern surfing revival was Irish as well, we need to take that claim seriously. The messiah’s name was George Freeth, and he was born on the island of Oahu in 1883. He had a part-Hawaiian mother and an Irish father. California clams him as one of their own, but so does the Irish city of Ulster. What there’s no argument about is Freeth’s important role in the popularization of surfing and his modernizing of lifeguarding.

Freeth learned surfing from its true inventors, the Hawaiians. The arguably Irish man brought his talent for surfing to California, surf-crafting the paddleboard and rafting it into service for saving the lives of those imperiled at sea. Freeth died in 1919, a victim of the global flu pandemic. A bronze bust of Freeth was stolen from the Redondo Beach Pier in 2008, probably for its melt value.

Freeth was a medicine man of the surf, a role model conqueror of our collective horror of amphibianism, and he shines on, in one form or another, for all those who cross from terrestrial to aquatic environments. Freeth is the Irish father of the tantric phrase Breathe through it; we celebrate him not only for his unfathomable mastery of oxygenation but his uncanny sense of direction in the storm-toss of disaster.

The digressions into the history of surfing are what make Waveriders different from previous surfing movies: Waveriders isn’t just here to catch the wild ride but to explain just how the hell it is that the ride of big-wave seekers came to be found here in the freezing-ass waters slamming the west coast of Ireland.

“Slamming” is the highly operative verb here, and it’s the beauty of watching human beings scaling gigantic roaring walls of water while balancing on something akin to Popsicle sticks that gob-smacks the viewer with mirror neurons of high-tension sympathy, that glues your eyeballs to the screen with the sheer poetry of vertiginous motion.

Waveriders is a rare treat. It’s a film that gives generous slurp to the three essentials, the salt, fat and umami of film: exciting images, engaging detail, and dramatic narrative dynamism. The eyewitness photography of some of the world’s most respected surfers is thrilling, to say the least. World champion Kelly Slater gets good face time in this flick, and he and the other wave riders are a pleasure to watch. The Irish surf in Waveriders is for these experts a powerfully cold, gray and merciless character consistently improvising wave-form chaos mathematics in an off-the-cuff aqua-physics that is craftily enabled by immersive photographers focusing on their subjects in artful shot after wave-smacked shot.

In Waveriders’ hands, the treated-intelligently viewer is led down a rocky path to unscalable cliffs above the sea and then through the opal tunnel of a wave just before it crashes in breathtaking beauty on a rocky beach defended by those self-same high-brow cliffs. The best waves of Ireland are accessible only by entrepreneurial surfers in boats and jet skis. Through the numinous mist and spray, a new mythology of the Hibernian wilds is revealed, of modern surfing with the west coast of Ireland as its Mecca, the wilderness from where rises the untamed curl in a perfect rage of self obsession, the same place a people of wit and courage, men and women both, come to slip one over on the wildly goddesses of the spitting seas.

Waveriders’ award-winning record speaks for itself: the film is a masterpiece, its cameras like otters and nimble whales slicing and dicing the waves searching for the proper angles of expression. Finding its perspectival angels, the film conveys not just the emotions, the quest for new waves, the yearning to roam, but the wisdom of physics, too.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD, 2010, Brian Charles Clark.

Another flute has been discovered in Germany. Like similar instruments found in caves in Germany, this one is thought to be around 35,000 years old. From today’s New York Times:

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”

Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.

Read the Times article »

Mary was a chemist, avant le lettre, that is, she was an alchemist. She probably lived in the first century A.D. and probably in Alexandria, but may have thrived as early as the third century B.C. According to Wikipedia’s skimpy entry,

The most concrete mention of her name in the context of alchemy is by Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote in the 4th century the oldest alchemy books known. The legendary Greek writer Ostanes mentions her as “the daughter of the king of Saba.” In the Alexander book (2d part) of the Persian poet Nezami, Maria, a Syrian princess, visits the court of Alexander the Great, and learns from Aristotle, among other things, the art of making gold. Whatever the epoch of Maria may have been, few doubt her existence.

Mary’s name is preserved in one of the names of the double boiler, well known to every cook: the bain-marie is used when a constant temperature is needed to heat a substance or when something needs to be heated gently. Hollandaise sauce, for instance, is just not possible without Mary’s invention.

Mary is also credited with the invention of the alembic, or still, a device used to distill medicines, perfumes and, of course, various forms of alcohol. She is also thought to have invented a more complex still, called the tribikos, a three-armed contraption sealed with flour paste.

The thing that immediately jumps out is that Mary was a kitchen worker. Indeed, it’s a not so commonly known fact that women paved the technological way for us by adapting their cooking skills to other uses, such as making cosmetics, perfumes and jewelry. Indeed, although Mary is remembered as an occult alchemist, she sounds to me much more pragmatic and immediately profitable. According to an article on Bookrags, she

studied the effects of arsenic, mercury, and sulfur vapors on metals, softening the metals and impregnating them with colors.

She invented a special apparatus to work with metal vapors, the kerotakis.

Plant oils such as attar of roses also were extracted using the kerotakis.

It’s generally thought the Mary’s alchemical kitchen work was based on the theories of Aristotle. You have to wonder about that, though, in light of what Sor Juana de la Cruz said some 1,500 years later. Sor Juana, herself an amazing chef, poet (she’s the tenth muse of Mexico) and scientist, said something like this about old Aristotle:

If he’d spent more time in the kitchen, he wouldn’t have been so fucking stupid.

I paraphrase, of course, but the sentiment is exact and can be found in Sor Juana’s La Respuesta, in which she refutes the charge that, as a female, she’s out of line writing about and conducting scientific experiments. (I’ve written about Sor Juana’s poem, Final Dream, here.)

Indeed, such replies by way of refutation are still constantly needed. When women like Mary are talked about it all, it’s often with exclamation points: The earliest alchemists were women! (Example.)

We all need to spend more time in the kitchen. Maybe then we won’t be so fucking stupid. As for me, I’m off to help my lover (a female of the scientific persuasion) prepare our week’s worth of roasted peppers because someday, when I grow up, I hope to be as smart as the women I’ve known.

What’s Ada Lovelace Day?

Pick a number, any number, as if you’d written a computer program to generate a random number; now call it Ada Lovelace Day. That’s today, March 24 and, along with some 1,600 other bloggers, I’ve pledged to write about a woman in technology.

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer and the logic behind the Ada Lovelace Day bloggers’ pledge is simple: we need more women in science and technology. Suw Charman-Anderson, the initiator of the pledge, writes,

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Furthermore,

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues. (Link)

So much for the context which, considering that I’ve written in the past about such women as Hypatia of Alexandria, wasn’t really needed, but hey, you, dear reader, should get in on the fun. Every day is Ada Lovelace day. Worship the yoni of your choice. Kiss a gal, bring her amazing gadgets, tell her, Why, yes, you can become a scientist. A designer. An artist of implements and a shaper of minds.

Ancient civilizations responsible for the birth of grape cultivation and wine-making valued sweetness over any other wine characteristic. The finding proves more than the idea that times and tastes change. It also provides archaeologists with a marker as to when casual fermentation gave rise to serious, domesticated wine production in the Early Bronze Age.

Naomi F. Miller, a research specialist with the Penn Museum, considered evidence from pollen cores, residue from ancient wine jars, archaeological seeds, stems, ancient fruit and the charred wood of grape vines to explain her observation that, despite remarkably early residue evidence for wine in the Neolithic period, the mid-sixth millennium BC, other evidence for grape use does not become common in the archaeological record until 3,000 years later, during the Early Bronze Age. Presumably during that 3,000 year gap, wine-makers were content to use sour grapes; wine-making would be a way to make the genetically wild fruit edible and potable.

According to published studies, initial cultivation of wild grape vines was used primarily for wine production; however, according to Ms. Miller’s interpretation, grape and vine cultivation exploded during the Early Bronze Age, becoming more widespread due to civilization’s ability to exploit the vine and select for ideal traits in flavor and robustness, probably in pursuit of the rare, sweet flavor that existed at the time only in other natural products like honey.

The search for sweeter grapes, Ms. Miller said, required genetic changes made during farming and cultivation, and distinguishes the first era of wine making around 6000 BC from periods 3,000 years later when wine-makers began to cultivate domesticated grapes. Domesticated grapes are hermaphroditic, or self-fertilizing, a key component in cultivating for characteristics such as taste and for marking a leap in the sophistication of farming.

Ms. Miller’s study, performed at Penn Museum’s Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA), was published in the journal Antiquity.

Studying the fertile region of Western Asia bordered by the Caspian and Black Sea forests and the Mediterranean coastal woodland in what is now Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Cyprus, where wine-making was born, Ms. Miller investigated a variety of sources to conduct an anthropological study of the earliest exploitation, cultivation, selection and spread of grapes.

“People learned how sweet fruits could be produced consistently by using hermaphroditic vines,” Ms. Miller said. “They probably had perfected much of their techniques by the middle of the third millennium, which explains the rapid spread of wine to all of western Asia and, ultimately, to the world.”

See also: Voice of the Vine; documenting the ancient wine trade

From a photographic point of view, Rawn Fulton’s film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place is boring: for all Burton’s geometries, the drama of angularity that plays throughout her illustrations in her books and the print designs that Folley Cove Designers still sells, the camera simply pans across pages and fabrics with plain-Jane horizontals and verticals, penetrating the material with slow zooms, the old in-and-out. It works, but it’s dull. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki
A Vintage International paperback
288 pages, June 2008
4.5 stars (out of five possible)

The world-traveled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinśki had a special affinity for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, in Kapuścinśki’s estimation, was himself a world-traveled journalist by the time he wrote his famous Histories. It’s an audacious move to write a memoir in parallel to such a venerable book, but that, thankfully, is just what Kapuścinśki has done in Travels with Herodotus.

Travels with Herodotus is a marvel of concise, open-ended insight—or “outsight,” more accurately, since both Kapuścinśki and Herodotus are concerned more with anthropology than psychology. Travels is also that rare book that teaches writing as it entertains. For teachers, Travels is a curricular field day, bringing structure and focus to a wide array of subjects, from science to art, from the ethics of violence to the perplexities of love. For lovers of travel writing, Kapuścinśki has created an engine of armchair transportation that moves through both time and space. For students of the reporter’s craft, Kapuścinśki is patient and profound.

“We depend on others,” he writes: “reportage is perhaps the form of writing most reliant on the collective.” Travels is an unpacking of this idea through a reading of Herodotus, of “how he gathered his raw material and then wove from it his immense and rich tapestry.” This is “precisely the point worth delving into,” and Kapuścinśki’s years of experience as a foreign correspondent give him an immense and rich perspective with which to draw lessons of concise imagination from Herodotus.

What I most admire about this book is the way in which Kapuścinśki doesn’t just respect difference but actively engages with it. Until he died in 2007, Kapuścinśki studied dozens of languages, literatures, folk ways and political systems—cultures—and developed a mature, rational, soulful style capable of bringing the masses to the particular.

Here’s an example from “a small Congolese town” where he reported on life under the gendarmes who practiced “all manner of villainy, brutishness, and bestiality.” Conducting interviews with a group of gendarmes, he thought about what else was present: “a huge swath of world history, which already set us against one another many centuries ago.” Slavery and colonialism have left scars “passed down for years in tribal stories, and the men whom I am about to encounter would have been reared… on legends ending with a promise of a day of retribution.” What happens? Kapuścinśki whips out a pack of cigarettes and they “smoke the entire pack, right away, until not a puff of smoke is left!”

Kapuścinśki writes for learners and with the faith that art, as writing, has the power to transform lives through empathy and shared experience. Such persons are rare, though: “The average person is not especially curious about the world.” The world is a “condition” best dealt with with as little effort as possible. “Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great, all-consuming one at that.” Whether it’s by way of “curiosity,” “a hunger for experience,” or “an addiction to wonderment,” Kapuścinśki weaves two worlds together, his own twentieth century with Herodotus’s fifth-century B.C., and brings them both to life.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.

Robert Drew’s Primary reopens an old conundrum: does technological innovation drive cultural change, or does cultural need drive technological innovation? In other words, do inventors work in a cultural vacuum producing stuff people then find a need and a market, or are cultural niches filled by market-incentivized innovators? Whichever side you agree with, there’s no question that Primary is a landmark in film history, marking a place where our expectations about what a film should be changed in tandem with the way we make them.

The innovation was a portable camera that allowed photographers to more or less unobtrusively immerse themselves in events, recording without distinction the mundane and the monumental. More or less because, in fact, though certainly smaller and lighter than previous pro-grade equipment, the cameras used by Drew and his gang of photographers looked like snub-nosed bazookas and probably weighed about the same.

Read more on Curled Up.

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Pantheon, Nov. 2007
1024 pages, cloth
5 of 5 possible stars

Herodotus – where would we be without him? The fifth-century Greek writer is known as the Father of History, and although the sophistication of writing history has certainly changed in the intervening centuries, the overall shape and method have not. Herodotus is a landmark in the history of civilization.

Herodotus was the first (at least in the West and as far as we know) to systematically collect documentary materials to form the basis of what he wrote and to arrange those materials in a narrative that captures the reader’s imagination. He even made some effort to verify his sources, a practice that led more or less directly to the rigors of the modern academy. In The Histories, Herodotus also set another standard: history is to be written by the winners.

That last bit has changed, thankfully, in recent decades, as history’s underdogs and losers get their day in the sun and in court. That Herodotus set a history-writing habit that lasted twenty-five hundred years is no mean feat. Still, it’s easy to be captivated by the story he tells about the Greco-Persian Wars that ended (around 480 B.C.) when Herodotus was at most ten years old.

The story of those wars is fascinating because the Persians, with their mighty armies capable of eclipsing the sky for minutes at a time with their showers of arrows, were defeated repeatedly by the weak and fractious Greeks. As Jared Diamond points out, the mountainous landscape of the Greek peninsula, with its population-separating barriers, is a natural breeding ground for city states. The alliances necessarily formed by the wily Greeks in order to beat the Persians, and the battles themselves, form the warp and weft of the historian’s weave.

So much for background on a name every serious reader already recognizes. What makes The Landmark Herodotus great is that it is a landmark; the book is so thick it would likely be instantly recognizable in satellite photos of your bookshelf. And it’s not fat that bulks this book up to the size of a well-fed satrap. It’s the maps and useful annotations that illustrate and elucidate every step of the way that make this book a heavyweight.

Herodotus is not easy going, and he flings names of people and places around like candy to kids at a parade. What a boon to have maps, at long last in one volume, to put a face on the place. With editor Strassler’s annotations and Purvis’s lucid translation, Herodotus at last becomes accessible to and referenceable by the average serious reader. (Strassler, by the way, already hit a home run with his Landmark Thucydides, the latter being another big-warmongering ancient Greek historian.)

There are a Sagan’s number (“billions and billions”) of translations of Herodotus available, and some are slim enough that you really can curl up with them. But the problem with less comprehensive volumes is that your divan or bed is soon covered with secondary books in order to understand the skinny one you’re intent upon. The Landmark Herodotus is a serious, and seriously affordable, piece of work worthy of any reader’s reference collection.

Of related interest: Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki

Originally published at Curled Up with a Good Book

The Plot to Save Socrates
Paul Levinson
Tor Books, 2006

Socrates said he knew nothing but, even so, he was the smartest guy in Athens. Apparently a lot of Athenians found that amusing—at least for a while. Eventually, though, he got on enough people’s nerves, and in ancient Athens that was enough to get a death sentence. (In the contemporary U.S., it just gets you a life sentence, unless you’re being held in Guantanamo, in which case nobody bothers with a trial.) Paul Levin’s novel, which resonates with the current political climate, is premised on the thought that some future time traveler might time-warp back to 399 B.C. (or whatever they called it back then) to try to persuade Socrates from drinking the hemlock.

Trouble is, Socrates doesn’t want to be saved. He is, however, intrigued by the idea of time travel. And, well, who isn’t? That’s the charm of Levinson’s novel: he bootstraps the time travel paradox into an airy castle of baroque proportions. (The time travel paradox, in case you need a quick refresher, is quickly summarized in the classic question: What would happen to you if you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather? But I’m sure you don’t need a refresher because you remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer [hey, wasn’t he a Greek?] squashes a butterfly back in dinosaur days and turns his house into a cupcake decorated with Bart and Lisa candles.) Alas, that is also the trouble with the novel: Levinson is having so much fun watching his characters going boing-boing across the centuries that he forgets about the key word in his title: plot.

I’m not sure I really care. This book is fun. Heroine Sierra Waters is sexy as hell—what (straight) guy wouldn’t fall for a brainy grad student of the classics? She’s just the sort of character to curl up and conjugate a few Greek verbs with. And then there’s Levinson riffing on the history of philosophy—what’s not to love? When he doesn’t get it right (and who, really, is to say, since the sources for ancient Greek anything are postage-stamp-sized shreds of burnt papyrus) there’s a reason: Levinson is subversive. Of course he is: his major source for the trial of the Socrates is renegade leftist I.F. Stone who, after retiring from a long career as a journalist, taught himself Greek, read the source materials, and retried Socrates in a famous (and idiosyncratic, to put it politely) book called (how’s this for stunning titles) The Trial of Socrates. Socrates came up guilty once again – though not, this time around, for atheism and contributing to the moral delinquency of minors – but rather for pushing anti-democratic and downright totalitarian ideas. There’s a terrible irony at work in Levinson’s choice of inspiration: Socrates was tried and executed by a vote of his fellow (all-male, land-owning) citizens who had their doubts about democracy and then condemned again, 2,400 years later, by a jury of one who was a dragon-slayer of an anti-totalitarianist. It’s my bet that it is I.F. Stone who is the novel’s invisible nemesis, Andros.

We meet Andros only in fragments of a never-before-seen dialogue (perhaps or perhaps not by Socrates’ student Plato, the prime novelist of the ancient Socrates) which eerily mirrors various Platonic dialogues concerning the last hours of the old man (specifically, the Phaedo and the Crito). Andros tries to get Socrates to come to the future with him. Socrates objects on various grounds. Andros counters with the thought that no one will be the wiser, as Andros is prepared to leave a clone in his place. Let the clone drink hemlock and you, Socrates, come with me, I.F. Stone/Andros, to the future—where I’ll put you on trial for various thought crimes. Or maybe not: Levinson seems to get dizzy at the twirling shenanigans and admits “that the free soul [meets] its match in the labyrinth of time travel.” Especially when he sends in the clones…

President Karl Rove is busy rewriting history (like a recovering alcoholic, one day at a time), so why can’t Levinson? Let’s see… let’s make the arch-traitor Alcibiades a hero. It’s The Gospel of Judas reworked for the contemporary agora of ideas. Maybe Karl Rove is Andros; as one character says, “I believe that in order for discoveries and new principles of knowledge to be well implemented, they have to be first introduced to people long before.” Anyone got a spare Mesopotamian battery? At least Alcibiades plays a major role in the novel. As Sierra travels to various times and places she becomes various famous (and not at all famous) personages (all of them sexy as hell). For instance, the much-beloved Hypatia of Alexandria. This wise woman was murdered by a Christian mob (why does that not surprise me?) in 415 A.D. But the novel never gets to Alexandria and we never see Sierra as Hypatia—it’s like somebody sawed an arm off the body of the book. Just as well: I love Hypatia even more than Sierra, so to have the two of them become one would have been simply too much for this weak heart to bear.

So, okay, there’s a certain slop-factor to this novel that seems to make it “light reading” (as so many reviewers have said). I’m not so sure it is light, and I’m willing to concede that the slop-factor is really cunning on the part of the author. Maybe. There’s a bite to Levinson’s wit that makes me think he is wielding his pen as a sword. Socrates says, “I know better to waste my time with students, who are likely to wound your heart, in due time.” Amen, brother, and of course, Plato, in writing the fiction we know as the dialogues, wounded Socrates just as Levinson is wounding (or “revisioning”) the history of philosophy. Every reader (and thus, every writer) is engaged in a conversation with the past and every conversation, since it requires memory, is an act of time travel. Readers, then, are time travelers wounding their grandfathers. Same old story, new every time.

That’s the beauty of the time-travel riff (with clones!): you get to wound the past even if it’s still the future because it really is the same old story. In Levinson’s New York City of 1889, for instance, a character grumbles about “the bankruptcy of the electoral college,” while Sierra, from the New York of 2042, is a grad student “at the Old School” which, presumably, used to be the New School of Social Research. And that, in the end, as Socrates is buried “in a small, private ceremony… in the Bronx,” is what’s up with this “novel”: social research. So take it lightly if you want but read into it if you can.

Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House, 2006

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive?

Indeed, when I taught the history of the three dominant monotheisms, my students were quite surprised to learn that Judaism, Christianity and Islam in fact share a common origin. We are, it seems, even ignorant of Christianity’s origins. This makes books like Aslan’s all the more crucial. “One could argue,” he states—and this is a fine example of his graceful sidestepping of our ignorance in favor of displaying humanist generosity—“that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it rejects not only all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.” “Religion,” he continues by way of pointing out the importance of myth, “is not faith. Religion is the story of faith… that provides a common language with which a community of [believers] can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.”

“It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are true. What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings”—in other words, about our cultural millieux. This is a crucial point for Aslan, especially in conjunction with the idea that religion is a “story,” a narrative of faith. For as he relates the long history of Islam, and especially its early years, Aslan argues that contemporary Islam doesn’t have to be the way it is: Muslims could change the story of their religion. By implication, this is true of all three monotheisms—Christians don’t have to suppress women or murder homosexuals. This, though, is only an implication in Aslan’s book: the subtitle claims it’s about the “future of Islam,” but he doesn’t waste too much time prognosticating. What Aslan does claim (though with almost no comparative analysis) is that Islam, at 1,500 years old, is in approximately the same stage Christianity was when Martin Luther and others instigated the Reformation. This is a fascinating idea, but I suspect it may be wishful thinking on Aslan’s part.What I especially treasure about this book is Aslan’s discussion of the first generation of Islam, which is well researched and beautifully articulate. As with all textually based religions (meaning, again, the religions of “the Book,” the three monotheisms that trace their descent from Abraham) there is a dirty little secret at the heart of the matter, namely, that the authors of the texts had political agendas. ‘Twas ever thus with stories but, when there are a billion or more people basing their lives and everyday actions on a text, it’s important to consider the sources. Muhammad and his Companions worked out a communal way of life in Medina but, for the most part, the Prophet’s revelations and laws were not written down until after his death. (Though not, as Aslan argues, because Muhammad was illiterate; how could that be when he was a successful businessman with records to keep and orders to place?) All three monotheisms are deeply misogynistic but that doesn’t necessarily implicate Jesus or Muhammad: “when the Quran warned believers not to ‘pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha)…’ the early Quranic commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s warning on the subject, that ‘the sufaha are women and children… and both of them must be excluded from inheritance’.” Again, the parallels to the early history of Christianity are worth keeping in mind. When Paul wrote “Let your women keep silence in the churches” in Corinthians and again in Timothy, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” we may be looking at Paul’s misogyny or that of one of his later editor’s. The point I take away from Aslan is that we must wrestle interrogatively with these texts and we must also always remember that we can change the stories we tell about them.

No god but God is not without its biases and flaws. Aslan holds an MFA from the famous Workshop at the University of Iowa, and he makes an embarrassing English major’s math mistake in his discussion of the community at Medina. Muhammad and his Companions, driven out of Mecca, found refuge in Medina where there were already both traditional Arabian polytheists as well as a large community of Jews, of whom, Aslan says at one point, the Jews “may have totaled in the thousands.” Some thirty pages later he discusses the massacre of Jews (an infamous sore point between the two religions) by the first generation of Muslims, stating that “the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source)” while “the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs.” Whether we take the original population of Jews in Medina as 7,000 (which is in line with Aslan’s first statement of “thousands”) or even 70,000, that adds up to either ten percent or one percent “of the total population”—not “a tiny fraction.” What Aslan fails to acknowledge, as so many apologists for monotheism fail to do, is that monomythic religions are necessarily competitive for both resources and believers—and that competition inevitably results in some sort of violence. His discussion of contemporary militant Islam is likewise hampered by a strange elision: he begins with Pakistan and promises to come full circle but never returns to the situation there.

If Aslan hedges his bets as regards the violence inherent in monotheism, he is elegant and (especially in our contemporary climate of monotheistic textual fundamentalism) courageous in insisting on a historical understanding of Islam. His explanation of the split between Sunni and Shi’a is the clearest I’ve yet read, and his discussion of Islam’s beautiful mysticism—the Sufis—is a pleasure to read. For those wanting to understand the history of Islam, Aslan is ideal on all but the last one hundred or so years. If his portrayal of the violence of Islam is flawed, his hope that that narrative can be overcome is admirable.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]