A rich foray into the history of Islam and the emergence of key cities as capitals of commerce, culture, and conquest.
A British scholar and journalist journeys through a complicated history of Islam via the major Muslim cities throughout the ages, from Mecca to Constantinople to Doha.
Former Financial Times and Economist foreign correspondent Marozzi (Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, 2014, etc.) fashions a skillful overview of the important seats of Muslim power while resisting narratives of “faith and fable” in the process. This is especially difficult regarding the earliest capital of Mecca, “mother of all cities,” much excoriated by the first chroniclers after the Prophet Mohammed died in 632; it was a recalcitrant city of trade essentially taken by the prophet and forced to convert to the new faith. This military struggle formed the pattern for much of Islam’s history over the following centuries as Mohammed, according to Marozzi, was sanctioned by the Quran to conquer. “Reaping the spoils of war was not just a pleasant consequence of victory in battle,” writes the author. “Having received divine sanction in the Quran, it was far more important than that.” The momentum of the conquerors took them into Damascus, “the perfumed city” that “has always soared high in Arab affections.” Subsequently, Marozzi moves from century to century into Córdoba, Jerusalem, Cairo, Fez, Samarkand, Constantinople, Kabul, Isfahan, Tripoli, Beirut, Dubai, and Doha. While the author stresses that this is a personal selection of 15 cities, he notes that he kept in mind what Herodotus saw as the importance of focusing on “great and marvelous deeds”—and each of these cities certainly witnessed their fair share of those. In the modern age, Marozzi covers the Taliban takeover of Kabul (and the terrible changes wrought by decades of war) and the astonishing urban transformations of the once-provincial cities of Dubai and Doha. The author is fair in his assessment of these significant cities and what they have meant to Islam as a whole, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
A rich foray into the history of Islam and the emergence of key cities as capitals of commerce, culture, and conquest.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-306-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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