Books we're reading this month
The World is Flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century by Thomas L Friedman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005).
Friedman is way too happy about the accomplished fact of globalization for my taste, but his detailed descriptions of just how accomplished that fact is makes his book required reading. Forget protesting against it and think now in terms of working within it. Once you do, you may be as amazed as I was at the possibilities that become apparent. All the good stuff, like democracy, rights, equality and opportunity, are just as globalizable as the bad stuff using the same fibre-optic-laden world the capitalists are using. The Luddites didn’t use clubs to smash the looms, they used advanced sledge hammers and modern tempered steel blades.
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No God But God: Egypt and the triumph of Islam , by Geneive Abdo (Oxford, 2000).
This thoughtful, calm book, published prior to 9-11, is almost inconceivable today. Yet better than the whole library published about Islam in the post-9-11 world, this one stands out nearly alone as worthwhile. Abdo documents in fine detail the 30-year bottom-up Islamist transformation of Egypt through all strata of society eventually including elite class wives of Western corporation executives shedding tennis lessons and BMWs to don the veil and piously commit to charity and social support. It isn’t the Western economic or military empire they are inspired to resist; it is the Western cultural empire they are dismantling. The book is spookily persuasive about that, without even trying.
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