A History of Jerusalem

Title: A History of Jerusalem

Author: Karen Armstrong

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005 (First published 1996)

ISBN: 0-00-638347-5

Pages: 431

The city of Jerusalem is the keystone of the mythological edifice of three great religions in the world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Even though outwardly professing noble ideals like love, charity and tolerance, there have been rivers of blood that flowed through the streets of Jerusalem, Zion or al-Quds as the city is known to people with various perceptions of God. Religion is such a fount of evil that even normal people turn to bloodthirsty monsters and kill their neighbours in cold blood simply because that person happens to believe in another mythological story quite different from ours. This book is a great description of the vicissitudes the city had undergone in the last 4000 years. And Karen Armstrong is quite fit for narrating the story as she is a former Roman Catholic nun who has devoted her life to writing, lecturing and broadcasting on religious affairs. With a balanced outlook, the author analyses the events which shaped up the modern city of Jerusalem in a systematic and structured manner.

Jerusalem was founded in the 18^th century BCE as a temple to the ancient Syrian god Shalem. We find mention of the city and the Jebusite tribe ruling there from Egyptian clay tablets. The Israelites who would later claim the city in modern times was still a tribe from Babylon held in captivity in Egypt. Moses liberated them and after 40 years of wanderings in the desert, settled them in Canaan. David assumed kingship of Judah in 10^th century BCE and conquered Jerusalem. It was only around 1000 BCE that David and his descendants would establish their hold on the sacred city for the first time in history. Solomon built a temple to Yahweh on Mount Zion and transported the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred Jewish relic there which provided a fountain of piety and holiness to the united kingdom of Israel and Judah.

After David and his son Solomon, the dynasty didn’t produce strong leaders. Powerful empires were growing in the east – Assyria and then Babylon. Nebuchadnessar, the Babylonian king invaded Jerusalem, sacked the city and its temple and moved the cream of the inhabitants to Babylon as captives. But the prisoners were not constrained in any way and they were allowed to pursue any economic activity they chose, while fully allowing religious freedom. After about 50 years, most of them were allowed to go home. The returnees, however, followed a very rigorous form of religion bent on strict observance of Torah and segregation of the inhabitants to outer quarters. The isolationist policies were incompatible with the tempest of Hellenization brought in the wake of Alexander’s invasion. Many of the Jews themselves found the syncretism of Greeks far more conducive to intellectualism than the blind following of Torah. Strife between conservatives and hellenists among the Jews resulted in the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes sacking the temple in 170 BCE.

The growth of Rome across the Mediterranean was a good time for Jews. Herod sided with the powers that be in Rome and erected a string of magnificent buildings in the city. However, the alliance was bound to be a fragile one as the Jews were fiercely fanatical when their temple was even approached by the gentiles which included their Roman masters too. Shortsighted zealots who whipped up frenzy against the Romans were instrumental in bringing about the ruinous destruction of the temple and the city in 70 CE, out of which there was no resurrection for the ill-fated temple.

Though we have no historical evidence to the life of Jesus other than the Bible, it is true that the Christian faith circulated in Palestine among Jews and gentiles alike due to the encompassing spirit of early Christianity and its stress on spirituality rather than physical or geographical icons like Jerusalem or the temple. Christians kept a low profile until Emperor Constantine lifted sanctions against them in 313 CE and declared it to be one of the empire’s official religions. Soon, the persecuted turned into persecutors and blood-curdling cruelty were inflicted on the Jews who were bundled out of the holy city and more and more Christian churches and monasteries were built in the 4^th and 5^th centuries. All the relics and holy places which we now see scattered in and around the city were conjured up from naught in those two centuries. At this time, Byzantium and Persia, the two great contemporary empires were locked in a mutually destructive war, effectively wiping out their superiority. Out of this power vacuum emerged the warriors of a new religion from Arabia.

Muhammad established Islam and instilled vitality to it. Though he died in 632, his followers continued his banner forward and in 637, Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem. The patriarch of the city, Sophronius, handed it over to the conquerors in a peaceful transition. Omar built the mosque of al-Aqsa on the Temple Mount. Caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in 688 to mark the site of the original qiblah (the direction to which Muslims turn to, in prayer). Muhammad began with Jerusalem, but later changed it to Mecca. Gradullay, the city became holy to Muslims as well, since stories about the Prophet’s ascension to heaven from Jerusalem were established as received wisdom.

The crusades in the 11^th and 12^th centuries saw rivers of blood flowing in the city, which created lasting emotions of enmity between the Muslims and Christians. Jerusalem could avail some peace only when the Ottoman empire rose to power in the 16^th century, when it was felt for a brief time that they would overrun Europe too. But as is common with dynastic rule, the empire began to unravel after a few generations of powerful emperors like Suleyman the Magnificent. Christian power that was curtailed since the crusades again became ascendant when Europe made great strides in economic and technological fronts. Middle East often fell to the status of European colonies and the state of Israel was formed in 1948. The city is now in Jewish hands though bloody violence breaks the peace more often than ever.

The narrative is well referenced and delivered with a clear outlook and a message of harmony and tolerance. However, Armstrong treats Jesus as a historical figure with sole references from the New Testament to support the argument. This is confusing and really amounts to mixing fact with fiction which is not to be expected in a book with a strong root in history. The author’s narration is impartial and objective on most issues except on a few occasions, but there is a subtle thread of pampering Islamic claims on the city as against those of Jews or Christians. This may be due to a subconscious effort to appear neutral as the author was a nun in her earlier career and naturally wished to outlive her past.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

A History of the Arab Peoples

Title: A History of the Arab Peoples

Author: Albert Hourani

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2013 (First published 1991)

ISBN: 978-0-571-28801-4

Pages: 502

This is a comprehensive description of the Arab societies and their culture which is focussed to the outside world through the converging lens of Islam. The book is not just history. Those who look at it with the sole intention of reading a narrative of the sequence of events like wars and accessions of rulers till the present day would be greatly disappointed. The author goes deeper into the psyche of the societies on whom the study was based and brings out insights noted for their clarity and logic. Albert Habib Hourani is a Middle-eastern scholar based in Oxford, who was born in Manchester to Lebanese Christian parents. His authority on Arab concepts was well accepted in academic circles. The author presents a all-inclusive portrait of the societies which he sets out to describe. Religion, literature, art and culture are also explored by the adroit historian in a great effort to look at the developments in a wider and integrated perspective. At times, the readers may feel a little distracted at the lengthy discourses about religious philosophies in the first period of Islamic expansion, but with hindsight, we conceive of the elegant structure of narration employed by Hourani.

The provenance of Arabia was clearly established only with the life and times of Muhammad, the Prophet. The vigour and charisma of the message he proclaimed and imparted to the people helped them achieve dominance of most of West Asia within half a century of the Prophet’s death. Byzantians and Sasanids, ruling the Eastern Roman and Persian empires were forced to vacate their claims on lands which the Arabs desired to possess. As can be expected, when the whole edifice of empire-building depended on one man, as soon as he is off the scene, it begins to crumble. Confusion reigned among the followers of the Prophet as to who should succeed him. Abu Bakr, his father-in-law became the Caliph, who had no divine authority, but entrusted with the duty of keeping peace and adjudicate on issues. Omar, Uthman and Ali followed him, but not without engendering fierce opposition to their rule. All three of them were assassinated subsequently. At this point, another potentate, Mu’awiyah seized power and ruled from Damascus as the founder of Umayyad dynasty. Medina, from which the first four caliphs ruled, was again relegated to the fringes of the empire, at least in administrative matters, if not religious. The Umayyads could hold the throne for only ninety years when Abu’l Abbas shifted the seat of power to Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs. Islam spread to North Africa and reached Spain by this time. Another caliph ruled from Cordoba in Spain, meanwhile a Fatimid dynasty was established in Egypt.

After the tenth century, a subtle change came about in the Islamic world. Arabic, the language which assumed prominence over all languages in the regions its power predominated, began to lose ground to local languages again. The most important change was noticed in Iran, where its language, Pahlavi, borrowed the script and many words from Arabic and the Persian language was born. Temporal power also slipped away from Arabia proper and the caliphs. The Seljuk Turks, who were soldiers or slaves brought from Central Asia to serve in the armies of caliphs and who later converted to Islam, held the reins of power. After the last Abbasid caliph was slaughtered at Baghdad in the Mongol raids of 1258, Turks set up their seat of power in Anatolia and the Ottoman empire gradually came into being. Former military slaves in Egypt, called Mameluks established a kingdom there. So by the fifteenth century, we see the Middle East where the ancient seats of power re-established in a different guise and under a new religion.

The next phase was the point at which a Middle Eastern regime exerted the greatest influence ever. The Ottoman empire under Mahmud II captured Constantinople which traditionally marks the end of Dark Middle Ages. The Turkish Ottomans carried the banner of Islam wherever their armies reached. Greece, Balkan states, Bulgaria and even Hungary came under their hegemony. Though their rule was tolerant to minorities by the standards of the time, they were facing revolts and insurrections from their European subjects. The height of Ottoman occupation came in 1815 when they reached till Vienna, but thereafter, the collapse was even more dramatic. Industrial revolution and the changing economic conditions were undermining the viability of Ottoman regime. By 1900, all nationalities split away from their yoke, and those of North Africa fell to the level of colonies of France and Italy. The empire itself was torn down at the end of World War I. The second world war brought independence to Arab states which had become protectorates. The formation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 with British and American support roused lasting suspicions about the intentions of western powers.

The author gives a threadbare account of the origins of various groups which share the Islamic heritage, but with different manifestations of guiding principles. Shiis, the most numerous and prominent minority gradually gained identity from twelfth century onwards. Shiis follow the path of Ali, the fourth caliph and the Prophet’s son-in-law and believe in Imams who are men of intellect but divinely guided and infallible. The twelfth imam, Muhammad was believed to have become invisible in 874 and is expected to return as Mehdi, before the Quranically inspired just society is established on earth. There were other minorities as well, like Ibadis, Zaydis and Druzes which lie on the fringes of Islamic society and deemed as such by Sunni jurisprudence in canonical law.

The last 100 years had been a period in which lasting and often violent changes took place in the Arab world. Though Hourani covers the period till 1991, occasioned by his demise, Malise Ruthwen provides a balanced Afterword to extend the arguments till 2012 when ordinary people took to the streets to demand removal of corrupt and oppressive regimes in an event known to us by the euphemism of Arab Spring. Even at the time of this writing, a violent conflagration is raging in Egypt and Syria and it is still premature to hazard a guess on the possible outcome of events. One thing is clear though. The concept of asabiyya loosely translated as the sense of belonging to a cohesive group and clannish spirit, which the author borrowed from ibn Khaldun, a medieval writer, is still alive and forms the prime factor which is poised to shape up the sociopolitical transformation.

Whenever the issue of Arab – Israeli conflict is discussed in secular media, there is often an argument about the current day ingratitude of the Jews towards the Muslims as the Jewish people were tolerated and allowed to live happily in the medieval period only in those countries where Islam was in force. While it is true that they were hunted out and denigrated in Christian lands, we should not read much into the profession of toleration claimed by Muslim sultans. The author says about minorities in Islamic regimes, “They paid a special tax; they were not supposed to wear certain colours; they could not marry Muslim women; their evidence was not accepted against that of Muslims in law courts; their houses or places of worship should not be ostentatious; they were excluded from positions of power. How seriously such rules were applied depended on local conditions, but even in the best circumstances the position of a minority was uneasy, and the inducement to convert existed” (p.67). So much for tolerance!

Hourani’s occasional philosophical remarks are quite captivating. See what he comments about defeat, “Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it” (p.300).

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Unknown Quantity

Title: Unknown Quantity – A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra

Author: John Derbyshire

Publisher: Plume, 2006 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-452-28853-9

Pages: 320

Mathematics is one subject which is best avoided by most popular science writers. The apathy of the audience plays a large part in this conceivable reluctance. Stephen Hawking himself says that he could have sold double the number of copies of his magnum opus ‘A Brief History of Time’ if he had omitted the only equation E = mc² contained in the book. So much for the poor opinion science writers cultivate about the general readers. Presumably, John Derbyshire and the publisher Plume Books don’t share this misconception and the result is a thoroughly enjoyable and infotaining book on mathematics. Unfortunately, it deals only with a topic within the vast ocean of math, algebra. The author is a mathematician and linguist and the celebrated author of Prime Obsession, a mathematical biography of Bernhard Riemann. He traces the history of algebra from the mists of prehistory to ultramodern concepts which is just finding acceptance among scientific community.

Mathematical ability was possessed by mankind from prehistorical times. People used it to quantify game of prey, and to distribute it among the tribe in a fair manner. However, the sense of arithmetic became abstract much much later. When the concept of, say, threeness as in the case of three lambs got detached from bondage to the physical entity and ended up in a symbol representing threeness, the seed of mathematics was born. Every primitive society had concepts of their own, but we find formulae of sufficiently advanced level by 18^th century BCE Babylon. Ancient Babylonians were very good astronomers and clay tablets of computations have come down to our time. We must keep in mind that these computations have no resemblance to modern symbolism. In fact, they didn’t even use letter symbols to represent unknown quantities as algebra does today. The first stirrings of thought in this direction was made by Greek thinker Diophantus who used primitive symbols in computations and is considered to be the father of algebra.

After the flowering of classical Greek period, Europe relapsed into the darkness of Middle Ages. The spirit of scientific inquiry and reason were kept alive by Arab scholars who flourished during the early Islamic period in Baghdad and Isfahan. In fact, the term ‘algebra’ was derived from the title of the book, ’al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala’ written in the 9^th century. The scholar Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarismi, who was the author, also gave the term algorithm through a poor rendering of his own name to Latin. When Renaissance finally dawned, Europe caught up for the lost time and surpassed all others in ingenuity of thought. General solutions of cubic and quartic equations (of powers three and four of the unknown quantity) were found in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Descartes provided the basis for modern symbolism. Algebra really took off from solving equations to new realms in 19^th century when Niels Abel proved that there is no algebraic solution to the general quintic equation (of power 5) in 1826.

As the author himself admits, the handling and processing of numbers alone is quite dry and devoid of colour, which adds zest to life. Math is not without such flamboyant characters, the most notable being Evariste Galois, the French mathematician who was the proponent of group theory that went on to become the essence of many other fields. Galois was a rebel who lost his life in a duel with an opponent probably waged for an unrequited love. Anticipating his defeat and sure death the next morning, Galois was reported to have scribbled a few notes on a piece of paper which paved the way for the development of group theory. That century also saw the re-emergence of geometry in the guise of algebraic geometry. Derbyshire also lists the brand new areas that have grown up in math like category theory, motivitic cohomolgy and others which are still not understood by people who are not in the possession of a higher mathematical degree.

The book is superbly conceived and delightfully presented, at least in the first three quarters of the text. Considering the nature of the subject, Derbyshire has worked wonders in presenting the concepts in such a way as to be comprehensible to any class of readers and with the right mix of history which is equally important to do justice to the title of the book. The illustrations are ample and the brief mathematical prefaces which the author terms ‘primers’ serve their purpose well. He also ensures that the readers stay with him on the same page, literally! The biographical sketches add interest to the narrative.

Even with all this, there is no denying that reading becomes tardy when the historical account reaches the 19^th century. From here onwards, the concepts become profound and turns unintelligible for those who have no background of higher mathematics. However, this is quite understandable and does not diminish the charm of the work.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star