Blog


About


Books

 Latest Post: Flash!

Agnostic
A Spirited Manifesto
Available April 4, 2016

   Who is the AT?   Books by LH
  • Agnostic

  • The First Muslim

  • After The Prophet

  • Jezebel

  • Mary

  • More from LH

     

An Extraordinary Submergence

Posted March 18th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

Submergence-356x535I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: art, ecology, existence, fundamentalism, science, war | Tagged: Tags: 'Submergence', hadopelagic, J.M.Ledgard, jihadists, ocean science, Osama bin Laden, Somalia | Be the First to leave a comment

Facing Down Extremism

Posted December 16th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Nick Kristof features an amazing woman in his NYT column today:  Hawa Abdi, the 63-year-old Somali doctor and lawyer who has confronted armed hard-line militias running rampant in the near-anarchy of Somalia’s disintegration – and, backed by the outrage of the vast Muslim majority worldwide, forced the extremists to back down.

Dr Abdi and her daughter were the two doctors I wanted so much more of in my recent review of Eliza Griswold’s ‘The Tenth Parallel,’  Here’s part of why, on page 139 of Griswold’s book:

The hill on which we were standing was a mass grave.

‘We buried ten thousand and seventy-eight bodies here,’ Dr Abdi told me as we cut through the press of new arrivals and picked our way down the steep slope to the place she euphemistically called the neo-natal ward:  a cracked veranda where half a dozen babies lay dying of chronic diarrhea, which is treatable.  Abdi stuffed her worn hands into the frayed pockets of her white lab coat.  When I first visited in June 2007, twenty thousand people had fled to her farm for safety;  when I returned in April 2008, that number had quadrupled to eighty thousand.

As the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and foreign aid workers fled literally for their lives, the one-room women’s clinic Dr Abdi opened in 1983 became a 400-bed hospital, and her 1,300 acres of farmland on a hill outside Mogadishu became a refuge for those displaced by the famine and violence.

Then this past May, the extremist Hizb al-Islam (Party of Islam), angry at the very idea of a woman running the place, ordered her to hand it over.  She refused.  They attacked, with 750 soldiers, and seized the hospital.

But here’s the turning point:  the world’s Somalis reacted, rightly, with outrage.  And their outrage – and that of Muslims worldwide – shamed the Islamist militia into backing down.  Dr Abdi could run the hospital under their direction, they said.

Again, she refused, demanding that the extremists withdraw completely.  More than that, she demanded an apology from them, in writing, for having wrecked the hospital.

A week later, they did just that.

Here’s how Kristof concludes his column:

What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me — and seem profoundly misguided.

The greatest religious battles are often not between faiths, but within faiths. The widest gulfs are often not those that divide one religion from the next, but those between extremists and progressives within a single faith. And in this religious season, there’s something that we can all learn from the courage, compassion and tolerance of Dr. Hawa Abdi.

But here’s where I disagree with Kristof:  This is not between extremists on one side and progressives on the other.  It is, I think, between extremists and the vast majority of Muslims:  the one and a half billion believers, including both mainstream and progressives, whose moderation – exactly as advocated in the Quran itself — never makes the headlines.

————————-

For more on Dr Abdi (Kristof refers to her as Dr Hawa, Griswold as Dr Abdi),  altmuslimah says it has a fuller profile in the works.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: fundamentalism, Islam, sanity | Tagged: Tags: Dr Hawa Abdi, Eliza Griswold, extremism, Hizb al-Islam, moderates, Nicholas Kristof, Somalia | 6 Comments
  1. rehmat1 says:
    December 17, 2010 at 5:09 am

    People like Kristof and Daniel Pipes who creates Islamophobia. There are no so-called “moderate” or “radical” Muslims. These terms are totally alien to the Believers as is the ‘anti-Semitism’ – which are coined in the West to demonize a particular religion.

    Holy Qur’an and the Prophetic traditions give more rights to women than any other religion on Earth. Holy Qur’an, doesn’t call women born “in Sin” as the Bible calls. Holy Qur’an doesn’t demonize women as the Talmud does: “Thanks G-d for not making me a Gentile, a Woman or a Slave.”

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      December 17, 2010 at 10:22 am

      Well that’s the first time I’ve heard Nick Kristof lumped in with Daniel Pipes! Kristof as promoting Islamophobia? In what world?

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    December 17, 2010 at 9:01 am

    Beautiful and inspiring, as usual. Thank you for sharing this story.

  3. Michael Camp says:
    December 19, 2010 at 9:07 am

    Living in both Somalia (in the 80s before the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence became powerful) and Malawi, I’ve always seen a clear delineation between radical and moderate Islam. Most Muslims I met deplored violence as well as the extreme treatment of women. I think moderates are the vast majority, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t expose the abuses of the radicals.

    I saw them come into Malawi, for example, from Pakistan and stir up moderate Muslims telling them they weren’t devout enough, the same way the Muslim Brotherhood did in Somalia. Hawa Abdi is standing up to the radical Party of Islam as a moderate Muslim woman (who also fights against female genital mutilation). I applaud anyone who does that, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali who does it as a former Muslim turned atheist. However, Dr. Hawa Abdi’s courageous stand is all the more effective than Hirsi Ali’s precisely because she remains a Muslim and has more moral influence on other Muslims to join her. Lesley, your point that the Quran teaches moderation is important knowledge that needs to be spread to help moderate Muslims stand against extremist Islam.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      December 19, 2010 at 5:07 pm

      Michael — yes and no. As you know, the vast majority of Muslims are well aware that the Quran advocates moderation, and are as opposed to extremism as you. My point is addressed not to them, but to those non-Muslims who imagine, whether out of bad faith, politically induced fear, or simple misinformation, that Islam is somehow inherently extremist in a way that Judaism and Christianity are not.

  4. Adila says:
    December 19, 2010 at 4:13 pm

    What an inspiring woman. Thanks for sharing.

The Real Muslim-Christian Fault Line

Posted October 5th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Huge subject, small space:  The Seattle Times asked me to review Eliza Griswold’s ‘The Tenth Parallel’ — in only 600 words.   Still, am glad I said yes.   The review ran Sunday, but edited further for space, so here’s the full version:

“Islam versus the West” is part of the over-heated political rhetoric now sweeping the United States.  Over-heated, and wrong.  In the past two decades, the two faiths have clashed most intensely and bloodily in neither the West nor the Middle East, but in Africa and southeast Asia.

Few westerners, if any, know this territory as well as Eliza Griswold.  Tracing what she calls the fault line between the two faiths across the tenth parallel, the line of latitude some 700 miles north of the Equator, she points out that it’s home to more than half of the world‘s Muslims and sixty percent of its Christians.  And then she takes us deep inside the fault line.

At Jakarta airport she waits to meet a jihadi killer fresh out of electroshock and waterboarding in an Indonesian prison, watching as he eases through security with two live rabbits in a cardboard box, a gift for his as-yet unseen newborn son.

She shares a helicopter with the commander of US forces in the Philippines as he talks about “the gee-watt” – military-speak for the Global War on Terror.  Then she calmly looks at how “the gee-watt” has destroyed entire economies (as when the US shut down the main company in Somalia’s trust-based hawala money-transfer system on suspicion of being linked to Al Qaeda, when in fact Al Qaeda financed 9/11 by wire transfers through Florida’s Sun Trust Bank).

She listens as a 71-year-old motorcycle-riding priest in the Philippines documents the Catholic paramilitary gangs killing in the name of Christ while doing the government’s dirty work with US-supplied arms.  “If this is what the war on terror is,” he says, “then it’s about terrorizing the people.”

She meets one of Somalia’s most notorious US-backed warlords, a man “with thick well-oiled curls and double-wide girth” whose thugs fleece his own population into abject poverty.  Goes on night patrol with the Vice and Virtue Squad in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh, site of the disastrous tsunami on Christmas Eve 2004,  as they enforce a strict Islamic morals code.  Even kneels down to pray with Franklin Graham – Billy junior – whose cold-blooded evangelism helps stoke the conflict.

Yet throughout, Griswold emphasizes that religion is not the cause of conflict, but its manipulated rationale.  From Nigeria to the Philippines, she shows how the battle for power and resources has been cynically cast as a battle between faiths, with the faithful used as self-destructive pawns to enrich the powerful:  hopelessly corrupt politicians, ruthlessly violent warlords, flamboyantly wealthy evangelicals and Pentacostalists, hard-core Islamist extremists, and (one almost wants to say ‘of course’) the CIA, one of whose top Cold War operatives planned to ‘win’ Africa in the 1950’s and 60’s by using Islam against Communism.  As his son tells Griswold:  “Manipulating religious conviction was part of what my father liked to call his bag of dirty tricks.  He saw religion as an ideal cold war weapon.”

Griswold writes beautifully, but all this makes ‘The Tenth Parallel’ a hard book to read.  The scope is overwhelming, and yet at the same time it’s not enough.   I wanted to spend more time with nearly every figure who appears in these pages – with the women doctors in a refugee camp, the insurgent commanders, the tortured jihadi now selling herbal remedies, even that well-oiled double-wide rapacious warlord.

In fact I wish Griswold had written not one but two books:  one on Africa, one on Asia.  Using the tenth parallel to “pull the book together,” as editors say, is a bit of a stretch – here and there, you feel her straining to make the fit — and it’s not necessary.  When a reporter is this sharp and insightful, has won as many awards as Griswold, and writes this well, any reader worth his or her salt will follow her wherever she goes.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: Christianity, Islam, war | Tagged: Tags: 'The Tenth Parallel', Africa, Asia, Eliza Griswold, global war on terror, Indonesia, Malaysia, Muslim-Christian conflict, Nigeria, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan | 2 Comments
  1. leslie cox says:
    October 22, 2010 at 2:44 pm

    I just read “After the Prophet” with great interest. Wonderful book. Once again I see where the Post-Industrial age has real problems with Clans, tribes and families of pre-Industrial life. We need to get out of there.

    Thanks.
    Leslie Cox
    Port Townsend

  2. Yusuf says:
    January 5, 2011 at 4:47 am

    I hope to get a chance to read this book.
    I had a discussion with someone a few years back and he said “religion has caused all the wars of history” or something of that sort. I simply responded “name one”. It surprised me how easy it was to parry his assertions, but it also surprised me how quick people are to make these assertions without actually examining them. This person was not able to come up with one example of a war caused by religion. in truth, I’m sure there must have been one or maybe more, but that’s actually beside the point.

Order the Book

Available online from:
  • Amazon.com
  • Barnes & Noble
  • IndieBound
  • Powell's
Or from your favorite bookseller.

Tag Cloud

absurd agnosticism art atheism Buddhism Christianity ecology existence feminism fundamentalism Islam Judaism light Middle East sanity technology ugliness US politics war women

Recent Posts

  • Flash! September 1, 2019
  • “What’s Wrong With Dying?” February 9, 2017
  • The Poem That Stopped Me Crying December 30, 2016
  • Talking About Soul at TED December 5, 2016
  • ‘Healing’? No Way. November 10, 2016
  • Psychopath, Defined August 2, 2016
  • Lovely NYT Review of ‘Agnostic’! July 14, 2016
  • Playing With Stillness June 22, 2016
  • Inside Palestine June 20, 2016
  • Virtual Unreality June 6, 2016
  • The Free-Speech Challenge May 23, 2016
  • Category-Free April 20, 2016
  • Staring At The Void April 13, 2016
  • Sherlock And Me April 3, 2016
  • Hard-Wired? Really? March 22, 2016
  • A Quantum Novel March 9, 2016
  • This Pre-Order Thing March 4, 2016
  • The Agnostic Celebration February 29, 2016
  • The First Two Pages February 23, 2016
  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
Skip to toolbar
  • About WordPress
    • WordPress.org
    • Documentation
    • Support Forums
    • Feedback