Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
***After The Prophet***
"The Arabs deserve each other, anybody who gets involved with their political morass gets what they deserve."
This is a brilliant book that can be read through in four or five hours.
Hazleton gets in and out in 211 pages. (After reading James Clavell's 1,100 page "Shogun"--which took place over probably 10 or 20 years - - I really respect this author's consolidating these pivotal events in history to a couple of hundred pages.)
The Western World has an extremely confused relationship with Islam-- and the extreme perplexity only seems to worsen the further up people go in US/western governments. (It's to the point where heads of state can't even spell the word "Arab" or locate Saudi Arabia on a map.)
The author portrays Arab society of the time in a way that is probably not so different to what it is today:
1. Intensely tribal (the tribalism preceded and antedated Islam and has never been resolved).
2. Intensely inbred (even today, cousin marriages are the majority of all marriages in the Middle East, and this terrible habit can be found even in non-arab Muslim societies.)
3. Intensely violent (Muhammad survived multiple wars and assassination attempts and of all four of the first caliphs within the first 29 years, two out of the four were killed.)
******
Even though history, for all her many volumes, has but a single page there are a lot of review lessons in this snapshot of history.
1. Disenfranchised people are great fodder for mass movements: Islam found adherents in people who wanted to be equal to other men. (This was also a theme used several hundred years earlier by the spiritual leader of the church.)
2. If you build it, they will come. But even that which is built won't stay: Mohammed and the Rashidun (the first 4 caliphs) built an impressive Empire that degenerated into squabbling that has never been resolved--even through all the many caliphates that were to come.
3. The builders of mass movements seem to have no inkling that they are going to die and that they might want to put a succession process in place. The prophet Muhammad was not the first and he was not going to be the last.
4. One should be suspicious of people who work to foment revolution on behalf of "the poor." Once one notices that Mohammed and Ali each died with 9 wives (5 more than what I thought was the limit of 4), it's a pretty short step to solve the mystery of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is photographed wearing a $5,000 pair of shoes. Or why the only Mercedes on the island of Cuba belonged to Castro. (Hint: the issue of the leader is that HE doesn't have the $5,000 shoes or the Mercedes. Not that YOU don't.)
5. Even though it seems logical that dynasties would be a good way to ensure stability (people that have common genetic interest should be easier to bonds together to manage a country, shouldn't they?) In practice it doesn't seem to work that way.
Consanguineous marriages cause them to inbreed themselves out of existence (that's what did it for the habsburgs, and King Tut died at 19 and none of his kids survived).
Or, weird familial conflicts tear apart any governments (as in the events of this book).
6. The Arabs are a tribal people, and the world that makes sense to them is one in which there is a bunch of violence and killing and warfare. Trying to govern them is a thankless task (as Ali was to find out).
Is it any mystery that Islam is the religion of choice for Pashtuns?
Or that Prislam is so popular with black people?
Before anybody tries to get involved with one of these endless conflicts, might they consider that: The Arabs just like living that way because they keep on living this way.
7. The Arabs are some extremely barbaric people
("She stood astride Hamza, gripped her knife with both hands, and plunged it deep into his body gouging him to rip out his liver. She held that liver high up above her head, and then crammed it into her mouth tore it apart with her teeth, spat out the pieces, stamped on them, and ground them into the dirt" [p.114])
OR
("They made the farmer kneel and watch as they disemboweled his wife, cut out The unborn infant, and ran it through with a sword. Then they cut off the farmer's head."[p.144])
OR
("Ignoring orders to take Abu Bakar alive, they sewed him into the rotting carcass of a donkey, then set it on fire." [p.15])
8. The Arabs are some extremely hyperbolic people. It seems like nothing can never be just.... said.
("I call you to the aid of your brothers in Mecca and Medina and you gurgle like slack-jawed camels slurping their water...... You have filled my heart with pus and line my breast with anger." [p.150])
8. It is so odd how religious ideas can be purposed and repurposed. Toward the end, Hazleton gives lots of examples of Persians repurposing Shia mythology in the context of the Iranian revolution. But the thing is: 1. Persians were not majority Shiat until probably the 16th century; 2. Arabs feel the same way about Persians as almost everybody else feels about black people. It is inherently bizarre to see them endorsing the necessity of the caliph to be a blood relative of Muhammad - - which would exclude them because they are Persians and not Arabs (as they are happy to tell you every 5 minutes).
It has resonances to the way that blacks in America repurpose Islam as a political statement (even going so far as to take Arab names), in spite of the fact that Arabs cannot stand them.
(I live right next to Dearborn, which has the highest Arab infestation of any place outside of the Middle East/ Maghreb and I have never NOT (!) ONE(!) SINGLE (!) TIME (!) seen a mixed Muslim arab/black couple. Even on the TV show "American Muslim" they had one person who found a hick who couldn't even read a single Arabic letter to convert to marry a single mother.)
*******
Somehow, I don't think that Islam as it was in the 7th century is the same thing as it has become in places like Saudi Arabia (after the uprise of the Wahhabis).
1. Women back then could do such things as ride camels (Khadija) or lead armies (Aisha) to challenge a successor to the caliphate (same).
2. Wearing the hijab started out as an affair of the upper classes - - after The Affair of the Necklace- and filtered down to the hoi polloi later. (p.44).
3. It is not that alcohol was completely forbidden. There are two incidents here of public drunkenness in a mosque setting even within the first generation after the death of Mohammed. (p.88).
4. The political Center of Islam was out of Arabia for over a thousand years, from the time of Ali until the Wahhabi resurgence under the house of Saud.
5. Wahhabiism was in existence even at the time of Ali. It just took a thousand years before they got control of the Arabian peninsula again.
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
Sunnah/Sunni
Howdah
Dotard
Episode of Pen and Paper
Affair of the Necklace
Paraclete
Path of Eloquence
Revelation of the Curtain
Syllabub
Rashomon effect/story
(Arabic)
Diwan
Shira
Ummah
Isnad (provenance of memory)
Historical names:
Abu Jafar al-Tabiri
Ibn Ishaq
Ibn Saad
al-Baladhuri
5/5 stars
***After The Prophet***
"The Arabs deserve each other, anybody who gets involved with their political morass gets what they deserve."
This is a brilliant book that can be read through in four or five hours.
Hazleton gets in and out in 211 pages. (After reading James Clavell's 1,100 page "Shogun"--which took place over probably 10 or 20 years - - I really respect this author's consolidating these pivotal events in history to a couple of hundred pages.)
The Western World has an extremely confused relationship with Islam-- and the extreme perplexity only seems to worsen the further up people go in US/western governments. (It's to the point where heads of state can't even spell the word "Arab" or locate Saudi Arabia on a map.)
The author portrays Arab society of the time in a way that is probably not so different to what it is today:
1. Intensely tribal (the tribalism preceded and antedated Islam and has never been resolved).
2. Intensely inbred (even today, cousin marriages are the majority of all marriages in the Middle East, and this terrible habit can be found even in non-arab Muslim societies.)
3. Intensely violent (Muhammad survived multiple wars and assassination attempts and of all four of the first caliphs within the first 29 years, two out of the four were killed.)
******
Even though history, for all her many volumes, has but a single page there are a lot of review lessons in this snapshot of history.
1. Disenfranchised people are great fodder for mass movements: Islam found adherents in people who wanted to be equal to other men. (This was also a theme used several hundred years earlier by the spiritual leader of the church.)
2. If you build it, they will come. But even that which is built won't stay: Mohammed and the Rashidun (the first 4 caliphs) built an impressive Empire that degenerated into squabbling that has never been resolved--even through all the many caliphates that were to come.
3. The builders of mass movements seem to have no inkling that they are going to die and that they might want to put a succession process in place. The prophet Muhammad was not the first and he was not going to be the last.
4. One should be suspicious of people who work to foment revolution on behalf of "the poor." Once one notices that Mohammed and Ali each died with 9 wives (5 more than what I thought was the limit of 4), it's a pretty short step to solve the mystery of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is photographed wearing a $5,000 pair of shoes. Or why the only Mercedes on the island of Cuba belonged to Castro. (Hint: the issue of the leader is that HE doesn't have the $5,000 shoes or the Mercedes. Not that YOU don't.)
5. Even though it seems logical that dynasties would be a good way to ensure stability (people that have common genetic interest should be easier to bonds together to manage a country, shouldn't they?) In practice it doesn't seem to work that way.
Consanguineous marriages cause them to inbreed themselves out of existence (that's what did it for the habsburgs, and King Tut died at 19 and none of his kids survived).
Or, weird familial conflicts tear apart any governments (as in the events of this book).
6. The Arabs are a tribal people, and the world that makes sense to them is one in which there is a bunch of violence and killing and warfare. Trying to govern them is a thankless task (as Ali was to find out).
Is it any mystery that Islam is the religion of choice for Pashtuns?
Or that Prislam is so popular with black people?
Before anybody tries to get involved with one of these endless conflicts, might they consider that: The Arabs just like living that way because they keep on living this way.
7. The Arabs are some extremely barbaric people
("She stood astride Hamza, gripped her knife with both hands, and plunged it deep into his body gouging him to rip out his liver. She held that liver high up above her head, and then crammed it into her mouth tore it apart with her teeth, spat out the pieces, stamped on them, and ground them into the dirt" [p.114])
OR
("They made the farmer kneel and watch as they disemboweled his wife, cut out The unborn infant, and ran it through with a sword. Then they cut off the farmer's head."[p.144])
OR
("Ignoring orders to take Abu Bakar alive, they sewed him into the rotting carcass of a donkey, then set it on fire." [p.15])
8. The Arabs are some extremely hyperbolic people. It seems like nothing can never be just.... said.
("I call you to the aid of your brothers in Mecca and Medina and you gurgle like slack-jawed camels slurping their water...... You have filled my heart with pus and line my breast with anger." [p.150])
8. It is so odd how religious ideas can be purposed and repurposed. Toward the end, Hazleton gives lots of examples of Persians repurposing Shia mythology in the context of the Iranian revolution. But the thing is: 1. Persians were not majority Shiat until probably the 16th century; 2. Arabs feel the same way about Persians as almost everybody else feels about black people. It is inherently bizarre to see them endorsing the necessity of the caliph to be a blood relative of Muhammad - - which would exclude them because they are Persians and not Arabs (as they are happy to tell you every 5 minutes).
It has resonances to the way that blacks in America repurpose Islam as a political statement (even going so far as to take Arab names), in spite of the fact that Arabs cannot stand them.
(I live right next to Dearborn, which has the highest Arab infestation of any place outside of the Middle East/ Maghreb and I have never NOT (!) ONE(!) SINGLE (!) TIME (!) seen a mixed Muslim arab/black couple. Even on the TV show "American Muslim" they had one person who found a hick who couldn't even read a single Arabic letter to convert to marry a single mother.)
*******
Somehow, I don't think that Islam as it was in the 7th century is the same thing as it has become in places like Saudi Arabia (after the uprise of the Wahhabis).
1. Women back then could do such things as ride camels (Khadija) or lead armies (Aisha) to challenge a successor to the caliphate (same).
2. Wearing the hijab started out as an affair of the upper classes - - after The Affair of the Necklace- and filtered down to the hoi polloi later. (p.44).
3. It is not that alcohol was completely forbidden. There are two incidents here of public drunkenness in a mosque setting even within the first generation after the death of Mohammed. (p.88).
4. The political Center of Islam was out of Arabia for over a thousand years, from the time of Ali until the Wahhabi resurgence under the house of Saud.
5. Wahhabiism was in existence even at the time of Ali. It just took a thousand years before they got control of the Arabian peninsula again.
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
Sunnah/Sunni
Howdah
Dotard
Episode of Pen and Paper
Affair of the Necklace
Paraclete
Path of Eloquence
Revelation of the Curtain
Syllabub
Rashomon effect/story
(Arabic)
Diwan
Shira
Ummah
Isnad (provenance of memory)
Historical names:
Abu Jafar al-Tabiri
Ibn Ishaq
Ibn Saad
al-Baladhuri