The luxury of finishing a book: you can meet a friend for lunch. That’s what I did last week at a homey Turkish restaurant near where I live. It began life as a rug shop, but since Sureya, the proprietor, loves to cook, she started serving food among the rugs. People turned out to love her cooking in return — I’ve taken Turkish friends from out of town there, and they practically wept with home-sickness – so the rugs retreated to a small pile at the back of the room. Plain wooden tables and chairs multiplied, and the news spread.

Last week was a normal mix for this place: a pink-haired student with Gothic script tattooed on her bare shoulders; a couple of hijabi mothers with babies; plaid-shirt-and-chinos software types; even a suit or two.

My friend and I ordered lentil soup and some eggplant dishes, and when Sureya brought them over she told us about her plans to move to a larger space nearby. The color scheme would have lots of turquoise, she said, and she was already haunting eBay in search of beautiful plates to replace the plain white ones we were using.

Maybe there’s something about Sureya that calls forth truth, or maybe I was still light-headed with having finished the book, but I said “Um, Sureya, you know, people tend to get light-fingered around beautiful plates…” And I found myself telling her about the time, many years ago, when I was out with a few friends in New York, at an Italian restaurant that the waiter told us was due to close soon. I don’t remember how many bottles of wine we’d drunk, but it must have been a few, because by the end of the evening, it seemed an awful pity that this restaurant’s hand-painted ceramic plates were to disappear along with the place itself, which is why several of them were somehow transferred into purses, jackets, and trousers — including those of an assistant district attorney from a major American city I won’t name here.

My friend looked on in bemusement at anyone so foolish as to tell such a story to a restaurant owner even as she was eating in her restaurant.

“So maybe stick with the plain plates?” I concluded.

Sureya seemed puzzled, as though I’d suggested the most peculiar thing. She thought about it a moment, and then her response knocked me for a loop.

“Why?” she said. “Let people take if that’s what’s important to them. Why even worry about that?” And I realized she was right. Who would even dream of stealing from a woman like this? That would be to invite such bad karma…

She was smiling as she reached behind her for a blue glass dish, and held it up in both hands. She moved it around in front of her to catch the light, swaying as she did so, almost dancing with it. “Look,” she said, “how could I not use this? isn’t it beautiful?”

It was. And so was the eggplant. And so is she.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot of understandable suspicion out there about exactly how good American intentions even are when it comes to the Middle East.  That’s the theme of David Rohde’s book ‘Beyond War:  Reimagining American Influence in the Middle East.’

The first step I’d suggest:  do some major reimagining of images, and forget Orientalist stereotypes like the camel-rider on  the cover.  The second step:  question the whole concept of influence.

The Catholic weekly America asked me to review the book, and here’s what I wrote:

When the Egyptian military seized power in June, American pundits instantly rushed to preach about democracy.  This took some hubris considering that two recent American elections – 2000 and 2004 – are still considered by many to be of questionable legality, and that redistricting is rapidly ensuring the minority status of Democratic strongholds throughout the south.

Is the US even in a position to preach democracy?  Especially since as with national elections, so too with foreign policy:  democracy is subject to money, and how it’s spent.

This is the hard-headed reality behind two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and former Taliban captive David Rohde’s new book, which focuses on how the US government spends money abroad, specifically in the Middle East.  It’s an argument for small-scale economic rather than large-scale military aid, and as such is immensely welcome in principle. The question is how to do it in practice.

As Rohde writes, “Washington’s archaic foreign policy apparatus” and its weakened civilian agencies mean that “in the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department, and Congress to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered.”

Whether Rohde is aware of it or not, the problem might be encapsulated in the subtitle of his own book, which assumes not only the existence of American influence, but also its necessity. Many of his sources are well-informed and palpably frustrated employees of the Agency for International Development (USAID) who are basically in conflict with both the State Department and Congress.  Yet the stated goals of USAID are clear:  they include providing “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the US.” [my italics].

For all the talk about the need for humanitarian aid and intervention (most recently in Syria), the reality is purely political.  What’s presented as humanitarian aid is always a matter of foreign policy.  And American foreign policy is still intensely focused on George W. Bush’s GWOT – the “global war on terror.”

The principle is that US aid should act as a stabilizing force against militant Islamic extremism.  But the very idea of the US as a stabilizing force has been thoroughly undermined by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even the best-considered foreign aid has now been rendered suspect in many parts of the Middle East, especially when there’s “a widespread perception of the American government as a finely tuned, nefarious machine, not an unwieldy cacophony of viewpoints,” and when authoritarian control fosters an intense rumor mill, with conspiracy theories rampant (most recently, for instance, Malala Yousufzai as a CIA plant, or American-backed ‘Zionists’ as the instigators of the new regime in Egypt).  In Egypt in particular, Rohde notes, “Washington faces an extraordinary public-policy conundrum.  Decades of support for Mubarak will not be forgotten overnight.”

Rohde details the conundrum in a series of country-by-country chapters, some intensively well-reported (particularly on civilian contractors’ takeover of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and on the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan), while others (on Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia) seem more perfunctory by comparison.  But in the light of the June military coup, the chapter on American dollars-for-peace financing and the Egyptian army’s vast business empire is particularly fascinating and uncomfortably prescient.

Oddly, though, there is no chapter on Israel, the largest recipient of American aid.  This seems to me tantamount to ignoring the elephant in the room, since the intense investment in an Israel that seems willing only to prolong and intensify the conflict with Palestine undermines US efforts elsewhere in the region.  In fact you could make a pretty strong argument that American support of Israel, driven by domestic electoral politics, runs directly counter to its own foreign policy interests.  Inevitably, the US is perceived elsewhere in the Middle East as at least tolerating if not encouraging Israel’s land grab in the Palestinian territories;  if its funds do not literally finance the expansionist project, they certainly free up funds that do.

Even assuming the best American intentions, then, they’re all too often interpreted as the worst.  But what exactly are those best intentions?

At root, this book is, or could have been, about America’s perception of itself.  Are we the world’s greatest do-gooders, distributing our largesse (and our arms) where most urgently needed?  Or are we acting to secure a blinkered and out-dated conception of our own interests?

Either way, as Rohde wrote in a New York Times op-ed back in May, “We should stop thinking we can transform societies overnight…  Nations must transform themselves.  We should scale back our ambitions and concentrate on long-term economics.”  His economic recommendations are accordingly small-scale (sometimes to the level of pathos, as in his enthusiasm for an Egyptian version of ‘The Apprentice’).  Yet his emphasis on entrepreneurship may actually undercut his argument that trying to force Western models on other countries will backfire.  And this is the argument that matters.

Like Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, says Rohde, American officials need to listen rather than try to muscle their way in, whether economically or militarily.  A little respect, that is.   Preach less, listen more.  That may not be much of a “reimagining,” but it’s the really important message of this book.

Under the heading Disappointing But Not Exactly Surprising:

There will no Turkish edition of The First Muslim.  My Turkish publisher received a reader’s report on the book from an un-named “academic member of Islamic history” at the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University, and today emailed to say that “The report showed more than a few aspects about your book which, considering the current political situation, might not be desirable and welcomed in Turkey.  I am apologetic to tell you that our company has decided not to proceed with your book.”

Since the book had already been translated and was ready for publication next month, this is a decision that comes at some cost to the publisher.

Here’s the upshot of the report:

The work seems successful in general.  However it has some lack of knowledge and misinformation.  Besides, it has an attitude imputing the prophet Mohamed and Muslims especially when it comes to Jews… The book is the product of a serious labor.  Nonetheless it is concluded that the translation of the book to Turkish is not appropriate when it is considered lack of information mentioned above and negative comments which are sometimes beyond the purpose and sometimes understood to be made consciously.”

The full report is here.  It seems I should have simply skipped over the tension between the early Muslims and the Jewish tribes of Medina, which culminated in the massacre of the men of the small Qureyz (Qurayza) tribe, and was, the academic reader argues, the fault of the Jews themselves.  (This argument is very familiar to me, since I’ve debated it many times with fundamentalist-leaning Muslims, both in public and in private.  I am equally familiar with most of the other points raised by “the academic member” — though the one about Jesus having or not having a father struck me as particularly picayune.)  The real complaint, of course, is that the book is not a hagiography, and does not conform to the requirements of piety.

As the publisher wrote, this is a political decision.  These are edgy times in Turkey, where Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party seem intent on deepening the instititutionalization of Islam despite strong secular resistance.  Three months ago, Taksim Square was the epicenter of the secular/religious clash.    Inevitably, my book falls into that same volatile intersection of religion and politics.  That’s the realm I’ve been exploring for years now, and will continue to explore.

Just not, it seems, in Turkish.