Forgotten Empire

Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia, edited by John E Curtis and Nigel Tallis, 263 pages

The Achaemenid Persian Empire, the empire of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, may not be entirely forgotten, but it is certainly overshadowed by the Hellenistic empires that followed.  When it is remembered, it is usually through other eyes, as the great enemy of the Greeks or as the great friend of the Jews.  Although the empire was the largest the world had ever seen up to that time and endured for over two centuries, even in Persia itself its memory swiftly eroded, in large part due to the vandalism of Alexander and his successors.

This exhibition, then, put on by the British Museum with the cooperation of the Iranian government, represents a welcome opportunity to explore the world of the Persians from within.  It is unfortunate that it is rather underwhelming.  The objects themselves are largely indifferent, and the essays included in the catalogue tend to be mind-numbingly technical, focused more on describing the archaeology of ancient Persia rather than making it live.  There are some interesting essays, just as there are some interesting exhibits, but on the whole it is somewhat disappointing.

The Kingdom of Copper

The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty, 621 pages

This is the second book in the Daevabad trilogy. It starts five years after the end of the first book. Sometimes a second book will jump right back into the action but this one was almost a reset since the start is five years later. It took 150 pages before it got really good.

Ali has adjusted to life after being banished including dealing with the occasional assassination attempt until forces pull him back to Daevabad. He is reunited with Nahri but after events at the end of the last book he is estranged from his friend. He is also on the outs with his brother Muntadhir. On the good side, his mother has returned and his sister is on his side.

Unbeknownst to Nahri, her mother Manizheh (we found out at the end of the first book that she is not dead) is plotting to reconquer the city her people once ruled. Mother and daughter may not have the same aims though.

I can't say that I enjoyed this one as much as the first one in the series but I did like it a lot. Chakraborty has built a wonderful world, has good characters and spins a good tale. I would highly recommend this series to anyone who reads fantasy.

Armenia

Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages, edited by Helen C Evans, 302 pages

For millennia, Armenia sat astride the major trade routes connecting the Mediterranean world with Persia and East Asia.  Although often under foreign political domination, a distinctive Armenian faith and culture flourished which preserved the unique identity of the people even as they incorporated influences from both East and West.  This catalogue of an exhibition staged by the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores the art of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora from the 5th century to the 17th.  Particularly striking are the examples of illuminated books and intricately decorated memorial stones called khachkars, although the highlight is a spectacular carved monastery door.

Persian Poets

Persian Poets, edited by Peter Washington, 248 pages

     O come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise

     To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

          One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

     The flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Persian Poets collects a wide array of poetry from seven medieval Persian authors, from the great epicure skeptic Omar to the great pantheist mystic Rumi.

     Love is for vanishing into the sky.  The mind,

     for learning what men have done and tried to do.

     Mysteries are not to be solved.  The eye goes blind

     when it only wants to see why.

The subjects of the poems vary accordingly, from love of God to romantic love, from high philosophy to hedonistic pleasure.

     Sweet maid, if thou would'st charm my sight,

     And bid these arms thy neck infold;

     That rosy cheek, that lily hand,

     Would give thy poet more delight

     Than all Bocara's vaunted gold,

     Than all the gems of Samarcand.

The selection of translators is nearly as diverse as the selection of poets, although the collection is bookended by the celebrated Edward Fitzgerald.  Anachronism is freely permitted, with references to a newspaper here and a psychiatrist there.  Unfortunately, this very variety makes it difficult to separate the poets from the translators, but this is a minor thing when weighed against the beauty, wit, and wisdom of the works themselves.

     Go to the librarian and ask for the book of this bird's songs, and

     Then go out into the desert.  Do you really need college to read this book?

The Armenian People

The Armenian People: From Ancient to Modern Times: Volume I: The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Richard G Hovannisian, 324 pages

The earliest recorded name for the land of Armenia is Urartu (transliterated into Hebrew as Ararat), meaning "high place", a suitable name for the high plateau between the lower Anatolian and Iranian plateaus.  This volume chronicles the occasional glories and more frequent sufferings of the inhabitants of that storied land from prehistory through the Classical period, the coming of Christianity, and the Arab, Turk, and Mongol conquests to the dawn of the modern age.

Despite each chapter being written by a different historian, some of whom cover some of the same ground from somewhat different perspectives, the whole coheres remarkably well.  The inevitable avalanche of names and places is made more manageable by the inclusion of dynastic tables and maps illustrating the changing human geography.

City of Brass

City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty, 532 pages


This is a new fantasy series that is set in the Middle East. Most of the characters in this book are supernatural creatures or half human and half supernatural creatures. The City of Brass - Daevabad is inhabited by djinn.


Nahri is a bit of a con woman living in Cairo. She accidently reveals an ifrit and then conjures a djinn named Dara. She finds out she is half supernatural creature. Ifrit are chasing her while she travels to Daevabad with Dara. He has a complicated past. As they travel, they learn about each other and start to have feelings for each other.


Meanwhile, Alizayd is second son of the king of the djinns. He is trying to help the shafits but things get messy. The shafits are poorly treated mixed race people - half djinn and half human. He finds himself trying to navigate court politics.


Nahri and Dara arrive at Daevabad where Dara's past may catch up with him and Nahri finds out how important she is and she how rough her adjustment is going to be. Alizayd ends up befriending her. Dara and Ali clash with Nahri in the middle and she is forced to make some tough choices.


This book got me hooked pretty quickly and I didn't want to put it down. It doesn't say so but the way it ended points to a series. I can't wait for the next book. There was some mystery, some romance, some drama, and some action. I thought she did a really good job of creating her world and presenting well rounded characters. I could see people who don't normally read fantasy liking this one.

Lebanon

Lebanon: A History 600-2011 by William Harris, 283 pages

William Harris' Lebanon follows the history of the fascinatingly diverse peoples dwelling in the shadow of Mount Lebanon beginning with the Arab conquest and ending with the Arab Spring.  Down through the centuries, Maronite Christians, Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and the Druze have lived, fought, and suffered with each other as great empires rose and fell around them.  Last century's Maronite-led, Western-mediated attempt to unite this complex patchwork, further complicated by an extensive diaspora, into a single modern nation-state soon collapsed into sectarian strife, civil war, and a new series of foreign occupations.

Harris consciously concentrates on the political rather than cultural history of Lebanon, an odd decision for the history of a country that did not have an independent political existence until the twentieth century.  The result is a narrative offering a wealth of facts, but a paucity of understanding.

From the Ruins of Empire

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra, 310 pages

In From the Ruins of Empire Pankaj Mishra examines the careers of three prominent Asian intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, all of whom struggled with the cultural, economic, and military dominance of the West - not only as such power was deliberately, oftentimes violently, exercised, but also as the uncritical embrace of the mechanistic, utilitarian Western worldview by modernizing elites in their homelands.  Each of the three represents a third of non-Russian Asia - itinerant journalist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani for the Islamosphere, scholar and activist Liang Qichao for the Sinosphere, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore for the Subcontinent.  Each sought freedom for his people, but also a form of modernity that preserved the values of his own culture.

It is possible to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in this book, problems that are only somewhat excused on the grounds that the perspective is that of the subjects.  Understandably, in writing about anti-colonialists Mishra concentrates on the negative impact of colonialism on Asian nations and cultures, but at times he oversimplifies to the point that he falsifies - even a casual reading of Finkel's Osman's Dream (which Mishra cites in his bibliography) demonstrates that the problems of the Ottoman Empire were not only - or even primarily - the result of Western imperialism.  That the reality was somewhat more complicated than Mishra's default narrative of Asians fighting for liberty from Western injustice is implied in the fact that both al-Afghani and Liang were persecuted by their native governments, and both took refuge in the oppressive, racist West - the only one of the three who was consistently safe in his homeland was Tagore, who lived under British rule (and was celebrated in the West, lecturing to packed halls and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913).

It is possible, again, to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in From the Ruins of Empire, but to do so would obscure the very real value of the book.  Beginning in the eighteenth century, the great civilizations of Asia were confronted with the reality that they were not, after all, the center of the world or of history.  How they adapted not only helps explain the world of today, it also has lessons to teach the West as it begins to discover the same truth.

Osman's Dream

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel, 554 pages

Osman was an obscure fourteenth century Turkish emir who ruled a small territory in northwestern Anatolia wedged between the Byzantines and the other Turkish principalities.  From their palace in Constantinople, Osman's descendants would rule over an empire stretching from Algeria to the Persian Gulf and from Hungary to Yemen, laying claim to the title of caliph, the head of all the Muslim ummah.  For centuries the Ottoman sultans shaped the history of the world, and their story, from the rise of Osman to the fall of Abdulmecid II, is the subject of Caroline Finkel's ambitious history.

Westerners have long regarded the Turks as exotic barbarians on the doorstep of Europe, and this perspective has been reflected in the historiography - a problem Finkel explicitly aims to correct, although it is true that she seems to consistently err in the opposite direction.  Oddly, considering that goal, this is very much a political and military history.  The opening chapters present a bewildering bombardment of names and places, but narrative threads quickly emerge to bring coherence.  Some might not appreciate how little the Ottomans were concerned with the West in the early centuries of their empire.  Others might be surprised at how closely early modern Ottoman history paralleled that of European nations: the strong national leader in the sixteenth century, the interminable struggles with national debt and the problems of increasing urbanization in the seventeenth, the religious and cultural retrenchment in the eighteenth, the mad scramble to modernize in the nineteenth, darkness and horror in the twentieth.  Certainly, Finkel's book will be appreciated by anyone looking for light in what is traditionally a shadowy corner of modern history.

ISIS

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, 361 pages

Within the last decade and a half, the Islamic State, known variously as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Daesh, has evolved from the start-up terrorist organization Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (JTJ) into the subordinate group Al-Qaeda in Iraq and finally into a quasi-state controlling an area the size of West Virginia and somewhere between 3 and 8 million people with an army possessing highly advanced military equipment.  More notably for those outside ISIS' zone of control, the group has proclaimed itself the restoration of the global caliphate, has received pledges of fealty from other radical groups in Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia, and the Caucasus, and has shocked the world with slickly produced propaganda videos featuring mass beheadings of non-Muslims and people being burned alive in cages, the execution of homosexuals by throwing them off rooftops and the demolition of cultural antiquities thousands of years old as idolatrous ties to the pagan past.  In the process, despite being denounced by Muslim authorities including even their former sponsors in Al-Qaeda, ISIS has emerged as both a major source of assistance and the premier source of inspiration to Islamic terrorists around the world.

The subtitle of this study of ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror, seems a bit exaggerated - most of the book is a view from outside.  The authors do give a solid history of the development of ISIS, explaining how a Jordanian thug became the seed from which ISIS grew, helpfully irrigated by Al-Qaeda, Iran, and Syria, sprouting in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, fed by defecting Baathist officials and thriving on (wholly justified) Sunni fears of Iran-backed Shiite pogroms in Iraq and Alawite oppression in Syria.  The authors are clear about the barbarism on all sides of the civil wars in the region, of which ISIS' atrocities are the epitome rather than the exception.

There are a few minor problems.  The authors occasionally contradict themselves - discussing the ISIS presence in Libya, they cite the transfer of fighters from the elite Al-Battar battalion as an indicator of the country's importance to ISIS, but later they reveal that the breakup of Al-Battar was due to concerns about the battalion's loyalty.  More disappointingly, they never deal with specifics of ISIS' religious ideology.  Their explanation of the opportunistic reasons for much of ISIS' local support is interesting, especially given what it reveals about the successes and failures of anti-ISIS strategies and the hidden fragility of the caliphate's position.  Yet it is not political opportunism that has drawn tens of thousands of eager recruits from around the world to the Syrian desert, and it is not mere opportunism that has convinced established terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf to pledge their loyalty to these upstarts.  Weiss and Hassan spend time explaining how the ISIS ideology developed, how it is spread, and why it is deceptive, but the book would have benefited greatly from a detailed account of what it is - without it the book falls prey into the postmodern journalistic myopia which reduces everything to power politics.