BOOK REVIEW:
‘Peace Be Upon You’ Reminds Us That Muslims,
Christians, Jews Have Gotten Along in the
Past…and Even Today – Despite Attempts by
Radicals to Derail Coexistence; Is Dubai the
Future?
While I was finishing Zachary Karabell’s
“Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim,
Christian, and Jewish Coexistence” (Knopf,
$26.95, 352 pages, maps, bibliography,
notes, index), I came across a story in the
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 Wall Street
Journal about a startling new design for a
68-story mixed-use skyscraper planned for
that Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf, Dubai.
Like Chicago’s John Hancock Center and New
York’s Time Warner Center, the building
combines residential and commercial uses in
one building. Unlike either of these
complexes, the structure will consist of
floors that rotate individually, yielding
constantly changing views. What struck me
about the project is the project’s brilliant
designer, David Fisher, born in Tel Aviv,
Israel and now an Italian citizen. An
Israeli Jew designing a building for the
Arabs? What gives?
Karabell, whose “The Last Campaign” is one
of the best books I’ve read about the
Truman-Dewey presidential race in 1948,
devotes the final chapter of his book about
religious coexistence in the city-state of
Dubai – in the face of the
down-through-the-centuries “clash of
cultures.”
In the chapter entitled “Is Dubai the
Future?” Karabell points out that the Jewish
Kerzner family of South Africa is involved –
in cooperation with the royal family of tiny
Dubai -- in building an island casino, the
first in the Persian Gulf.
Not only the Kerzners, but the prominent
American Jewish supporter of Israel,
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, are mentioned in the
chapter. Zuckerman, who owns U.S. News &
World Report, made his fortune in real
estate; he sold several of his surplus
luxury New York buildings to an arm of the
Dubai government, the same government that
was involved in the disastrous – and aborted
-- U.S. ports sale that brought so much
attention to Dubai last year.
In the Dubai chapter, Karabell describes how
an entrepreneurial Coptic (Christian)
Egyptian family is involved in the telecom
business in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle
East.
The point the author – educated at Columbia,
Oxford and Harvard, where he received his
Ph.D in 1996 – is trying to make, as I read
it, is that religious and ethnic conflict is
only part of the story of the three
religions in the region: The rest of the
story – as Paul Harvey would put it – is
that moderate, often secular Islamic regimes
can and do get along with Christians and
Jews.
A current example examined by Karabell is
the relationship between Jordan and Israel.
They’ve had diplomatic relations since 1994
and cooperate on water projects on the
Jordan River valley. This relationship goes
back to the current ruler’s
great-grandfather, who tried to moderate the
conflict between his Jordan – originally
called Transjordan and a part of the
Palestinian mandate – and the newly declared
State of Israel. He definitely was a
pragmatic leader who unfortunately was
assassinated in 1951.
If you’re not a history buff – as I
definitely am – “Peace Be Upon You” may be
hard slogging. The author crams a lot of
history into a relatively short book, but I
find Karabell’s writing elegant, reasoned
and balanced.
For instance, he deals with (Page 266-267)
with the hundreds of thousand of Jewish
refugees who were forced to leave their
homes in Muslim countries after the creation
of Israel in 1948. This is a subject often
missing or mentioned in passing in books
about the Arab-Israeli conflict, including
Jimmy Carter’s tome that I recently
reviewed.
Most historians deal with Arab refugees from
the former Palestine mandate, but they fail
to address Jews from countries as diverse as
Iran and Algeria who were pressured to leave
their ancestral homes to emigrate to Israel
and elsewhere. Iraq alone had 150,000 Jews
in the late 1940s – almost all of whom were
forced to leave, Karabell notes. Instead of
being crammed into squalid refugee camps by
the Egyptians or Lebanese or Jordanians,
these Sephardic Jews were integrated into
Israel and other countries to which they
went.
A prime example is the Saatchi advertising
empire, based in London. It was founded by
Charles and Maurice Saatchi, Iraqi Jews who
settled in England and contributed to the
commerce and culture of the U.K. There is
only a tiny remnant of the once flourishing
Jewish community in today’s Iraq. The same
holds true of Egypt, which had a large and
prosperous Jewish community in both Cairo
and Alexandria before 1948.
Dubai may be onto something in its
moderation of Islam; it’s one of the few
Muslim countries where people can consume
alcohol in a public setting. The business of
Dubai -- part of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.)
-- is business, to paraphrase Calvin
Coolidge. It has few oil resources, unlike
gigantic fundamentalist Islamic neighbor
Saudi Arabia.
Instead, Dubai is unconsciously (or maybe
even consciously) emulating Israel by
developing sustained growth through
entrepreneurial efforts. Israel, about the
size of Massachusetts or New Jersey and a
third the size in area of West Virginia, has
one of the largest generic pharmaceutical
industries in the world, to cite just one
example. It’s a net exporter of food, thanks
to state-of-the-art agribusiness. Its
natural resources are its people gathered in
from all points of the compass.
A critic of Karabell’s book might say he
cherry-picks examples of inter-religion
cooperation, such as Cordoba in Islamic
Spain, Cairo and Damascus during the time of
the Crusades and the present-day examples.
He could have included Salonica, when it was
part of the Ottoman Empire; in his excellent
bibliography, Karabell cites Mark Mazower’s
outstanding “Salonica: City of Ghosts,
Christians, Muslims, and Jews” published by
Knopf in 2005, a book I read and reviewed.
Around the turn of the 20th Century, before
it became part of today’s Greece, Salonica
was about evenly divided between Muslims,
Christians and Jews.
Mazower tells how the Ottoman Empire – also
praised by Karabell – practiced a
live-and-let-live policy toward Christians
and Jews. Basically, they were given limited
self-government, as long as they were loyal
to Istanbul and paid the poll tax required
of non-Muslims. Both historians – Karabell
and Mazower – agree that a multi-cultural
empire is much better for religious
minorities than a nationalistic country like
Nazi Germany or today’s Vietnam or Iran.
One way of looking at the U.S. – my way – is
to consider this nation a de facto
multicultural empire, dominated by
Christians, but tolerating and accepting
other faiths. In that respect, we’re like
the golden age of Moorish Spain or the
mostly tolerant – on its own terms – Ottoman
Empire, which actually lasted longer than
the Roman one.
Karabell deals with Orientalism and
colonization by Europeans, which the
Europeans thought was only fair since the
Muslims had colonized and occupied much of
southern Europe, including Spain, southern
France, Greece and the Balkans. Muslims of
course didn’t look at it this way and have
resented the West, even as they’ve admired
aspects of it.
In his discussion of T.E. Lawrence –
Lawrence of Arabia – and the Arab Revolt of
1916, Karabell provides an answer (Page 248)
to a question that I’ve wondered about: The
source of the wonderful book title “Dream
Palace of the Arabs” by Fouad Ajami,
published almost a decade ago. In his 1935
book “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” – published
the year Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash
– he wrote:
“All men dream…but not equally. Those who
dream by night in the dusty recesses of
their minds wake in the day to find that it
was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
dangerous men, for they may act their dream
with open eyes, to make it possible. This I
did. I meant to make a new nation, to
restore lost influence, to give twenty
millions of Semites the foundations on which
to build an inspired dream palace of the
national thoughts…”
Summing up, read “Peace Be Upon You” and
pray to whatever higher power you believe in
that peaceful coexistence of the three great
monotheistic faiths is the “dream palace” of
our future world.
Publisher’s web site:
www.aaknopf.com
