The Shia Revival

Anyone who’s interested in knowing more about contemporary Shiism and especially its role in Middle Eastern politics should stop what they’re doing and immediately buy this book. Vali Nasr has written a truly superb account of the split between Islam’s two sects, and how this ancient divide manifests itself in the political rivalries and religious identity politics we’re witnessing in the region today. To be honest, I expected this to be an insightful and important book, but not necessarily an enjoyable one. Happily, I was wrong: it’s a pleasurable read as well. Mr. Nasr has enviable contacts in the Muslim world, and the book is peppered with all sorts of fascinating anecdotes and asides. We learn that Saddam offered the Shah to kill off Khomeini during his Najaf exile, and that he, the Baathist leader, later regretted not having ignored the Shah’s refusal. And who knew that Ayatollah Khoi so disliked Khomeini’s activist style of politics that he sent the Shah a special prayer and a ring on the eve of the Islamic revolution? We should be grateful to Vali Nasr for this riveting, timely, and splendid book.

The Dark Side of Benazir?

I’ve been following the Benazir Bhutto coverage in the Western press with some dismay, and the piece by William Dalrymple finally irked me enough to say something. What I find objectionable in these rather predictable Benazir-as-Westernized-princess analyses is two things. First, the unattractive anti-female strain in the writing that masquerades as blunt talk about her privileged background. What Mr. Dalrymple seems to dislike most about the assassinated leader is not what her legacy says about the ailing state of Pakistani politics, but her very feminine qualities; he lists with distaste her love for romance novels, her fondness for window shopping, and worst of all, in his eyes, her taste for ice cream. He sniffily says it would be hard to imagine another Eastern head of state mentioning the ‘sin’ of eating ice cream. Perhaps not. But since when have we faulted male heads of taste for their indulgence in luxury whiskey, cigars, or other more masculine (read appropriate) habits?

The second point that is being exhaustively harped upon is her privileged background, how growing up in a wealthy aristocratic family made her inexorably different from the passes she governed. Is this not true of leaders across the Middle East and Asia? If they were not born to such families, than once in office they began behaving as if they were anyway. We have the king of Jordan, who essentially behaves like a tan European monarch, the corrupt leaders of Egypt with their palaces on the Sinai, the royal family of Saudi Arabia….really, one could go on and on, were it not so boring. I think this is more of the shoddy treatment Benazir is receiving posthumously for being female and Pakistani, because there are far more important matters to dwell on. Ahmed Rashid writing in the Washington Post did not resort to this, and I recommend his insightful piece for rising above the facile Antoinette analysis so rife in the Western papers.