UruguayI blogged somewhere or other about small, quiet countries you never hear about, where nothing much happens and the citizenry chug along in cheerful prosperity, enjoying as much happiness as the human condition will allow, minding their nation’s own business, and grateful for its obscurity. I raised Slovenia as my model, with New Zealand, Finland, and Taiwan as supporting players.
I may have found another one. Earlier this month I got chatting to a lady from Uruguay. How are things in Montevideo? I asked, honestly not having the shadow of a clue. She said things are just fine: some poverty, a touch of Latin Americanness still in politics (the place is on its umpteenth constitution), the usual left-intellectual nuisances in the universities trying to make trouble, localized crime problems (which she blamed on immigrants from Brazil). On the whole, though, she made Uruguay sound like a pretty nice place, perhaps deserving membership in my club of happy-in-obscurity nations.
When I mentioned this to a cynical New York acquaintance, she said she thought I should pack “a pair of those weird smoky not quite sunglasses glasses that Third World dictators — especially Arab ones — favor,” and also a machine gun, as household essentials for emigrating to any nation whose name ends in “-guay.” She’s probably right; but hey, I can dream.
Are your nafses mutma‘inna?Robert Spencer has a new book coming out, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran. Spencer belongs to that enviable class of writers who (a) write fluently and well, and (b) have mastered the art of writing the same book over and over in a slightly different form. This works best with fiction — think of Agatha Christie or Patrick O’Brian — but as Spencer illustrates, it can be done with nonfiction too, most easily with polemic. All Spencer’s books really have the same title, the one I gave to my review of Religion of Peace?
I am occasionally — very occasionally, I am glad to say — taken with the urge to have a go at the raw material Spencer works with: the Koran and its various supplements and commentaries. The urge came upon me in mid-August while waiting in line at a local fast-food joint. This is a little take-out place run by a Pakistani family, with a nice line in curries, biryanis, and items made with chick-peas. (What a lot of things you can do with chick-peas!) Well, there I was waiting in line for my order, when my eye fell upon a rack of pamphlets on the wall. I asked someone to hold my place, and went over to take a look. The pamphlets seemed to be Islamic tracts of various kinds, many in English. I took one at random and got back in line.
The counter of the shop has a glass front, behind which are displayed Pakistani delicacies and desserts. As the lady was ringing me up, I decided to go for a couple of pink confections that looked to be made from coconut. I asked her how much they were. “Five dollars a pound.” Good heavens, I said, I don’t want a pound, just a couple. How much for two?
The lady, who must have missed a couple of classes at Rawalpindi Retail Sales Charm School, rolled her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. We sell them by the pound, you see?”
Just at that moment her husband came by. He asked her something in Urdu. She replied, and nodded towards me. The husband looked at me. Then he looked at my order, and at the Islamic pamphlet I’d put on the counter beside it. The sun came out. I got a big smile. “No charge for dessert! No charge!”
I guess these are people who love their faith, and are proud and happy to see someone take an interest in it. There is, of course, another side to the matter. (Here, for example.) I must say, though, I’ve never been able to summon up any strong negative feelings towards Islam itself, even after reading a couple of Robert Spencer’s books. It is possible to nurse strong negative feelings towards all religions — ref. Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. — but to hate one particular religion, I think you need to be strongly committed to some other one — a sort of Yankees/Red Sox principle.
There might be something atavistic here, too, some folk memory of the British Empire, whose warriors and administrators mostly admired Islam while looking with scorn on Hinduism and Buddhism as grotesque and unmanly. (This comes out clearly in, of course, Kipling.) Some of them — the explorer Richard Burton would be an example — lumped in Christianity with the soft, womanish religions, to be contrasted unfavorably with masculine Islam.
