Stephen Sulaiman Schwartz

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2788630.html

A book about Sufism, tracing it from beginning to the present day, linking together various things of which I was aware and in which I was already interested (the Bektashi, Rūmī, the whirling dervishes, Said Nursî) into a longer historical narrative.

Unfortunately it's not all that good. to start with it's a work of apologetics written by a true believer, viewing events and people jumbled together through a partisan lens. A lot of effort is spent on denouncing Wahhabism (fair enough, but that then means you don't let your own people stand on their own merits). The net of historical adherents to Sufism is cast rather with, including some people who I suspect had never heard of it in reality. The narrative is curiously unmoored from the wider historical context. the explanation of Sufist ideas seemed relatively clear, but I was irritated by the failure to link it convincingly to other things I know about. I'm sure there are better books about Sufism out there, and I'll keep an eye out for them.… (mais)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1385147.ht...

The two eponymous faces are fanaticism and moderation; the book's subtitle is 'Saudi fundamentalism and its role in terrorism', and the whole thrust of the book is to expose Wahhabism and its linkage with the Saudi monarchy as a driving force in Islamic terrorism worldwide. The tone of the book is offputtingly polemical at times, but there were a couple of good sections - Schwarz is pro-Shi'ite, so his take on Iran is much more sober than one usually gets from US sources; and his account of the failure of Wahhabism to make much headway in Bosnia or Kosovo is almost comical. However, he has a painfully unconvincing page on Iraq (I guess to try and exploit the 2002 market) and also numerous other surprising asides - that the Yugoslav wars might have been planned from the Kremlin, or that Trotsky's assassination was the most famous terrorist act of the 20th century (the latter particularly surprising from someone who knows Sarajevo as well as Schwartz does).

However, despite the weaknesses of the argument, the case is well made that if the US is actually serious about fighting terrorism through regime change, there are worse places to do it than Saudi Arabia. Also Schwartz's call for more intense monitoring and intervention by US authorities in their own domestic Islam religious and educational discourse is probably well-founded, and it has to be said that the recent incidents of home-grown extremism in America rather prove his point. But I would be interested to read a more sober and detailed account of the relationship between Wahhabism and Saudi money; the indications are all there but the details didn't quite join up for me.… (mais)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1172728.html

This book was sent to me by the author some time back. It's a collection of essays of varying lengths about the Jewish traditions of Bosnia (Sarajevo in particular) and of the "Albanian lands". Most of the essays explore the history of the Sephardim exiled from Spain and Portugal in 1492: while of course the majority ended up further south and east, in Istanbul and especially Thessalonica, Sarajevo and the other major Bosnian towns also became smaller focuses of settlement, and Schwartz looks at the major historical figures and the surviving architectural traces - in one piece, he and a friend attempt to locate the tomb of the apostate false Messiah, Sabbetai Zvi (1626-1676) in Ulcinj in southern Montenegro (Ulcinj is the centre of Montenegro's Albanian population).

It is a subject about which I knew very little - I've met once or twice with Jakob Finci, the leader of Bosnia's Jewish community, and also sympathised with Ivo Andrić's Jewish narrator in his short story "Letter from 1920", who flees the small-mindedness and ethnic divisions of his home town for a life elsewhere. Schwartz is not an Andrić fan, and has a short piece on five great ex-Yugoslav writers in which he ranks Danilo Kiš, Meša Selimović, Miroslav Krleža and Miloš Crnjanski as better than their Nobel-prize-winning conpatriot - I confess I had heard only of the first two, and only knew of Selimović because he features on banknotes from both sides in Bosnia and shared my birthday (though 1910 rather than 1967). More for my reading list...… (mais)