The Nomad and the Olive Branch

Reza Aslan is one of those intellectuals notorious for their uncompromising stance, bluntness, and, to a certain degree, political incorrectness. It comes to no surprise, then, that his latest publication, God: A Human History , reflects his headstrong approach in the sphere of all things religion and spirituality. However, despite Aslan's misgivings, this book is a thoroughly enjoyable read and indeed a most enlightening one. While his previous book, Beyond Fundamentalism , explored the notion of a "cosmic war" of ideologies against a backdrop of globalization, God: A Human History instead looks at how religion came to be from a more scientific standpoint, coming to a conclusion based on his own personal experiences with faith and belief. The book starts with Aslan's recounting of his conversion to Christianity and subsequent reversion to Islam, followed by a revelation of his newly adopted pantheistic approach to which he returns to near the end of the book...

I didn't know what to expect when reading a book composed by one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals of the 21st Century. For a second, I thought I was gonna read a book about the traditional tropes of radicals in the 3 Abrahamic faiths being rooted in a minority of their respective followers. The shocking thesis of Reza Aslan portrayed in this book describes a much more endemic problem: the idea of a "cosmic war" between what each radical group perceives as "good" and "evil", and how that differs and at the same time finds common ground between the 3 faiths. The backdrop of globalization further emphasizes the de-nationalization of identity and the construction of a new identity that transcends geographical and racial boundaries, whether he talks of the radical groups such as Al Qaeda, the Christian right-wing extremists in the USA, or the Zionist settler groups in the West Bank. He asserts that such a history goes back to some of the ear...

This is the first post in a series of posts that deals with books I have read or come across. The first book to receive this treatment is "A History of the Arab Peoples" by the late Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani. I finished reading this book about a year ago and I remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed by its premise. The book serves as an excellent primer to Arabs at the advent of Islam, but falls short of giving us as detailed a history as possible about Arabs prior to the coming of the world's second largest religious group. It seems to run on the hypothesis that modern Arab history started with the coming of Islam, and that the Arabs have had no history prior to this. The same has been said of the Palestinians, who are accused of having no history prior to 1948. The presence of a people and the socio-political climate that governed them in the past is just as important as the one in the present. In fact, it can be argued that much of what we see in Arab society...

The First World War was one of the costliest wars if not the costliest war in the last two millennia. Both Allied and Central powers lost much in terms of manpower, military strength, production capability, and economic stability. [1] Given historical tensions between Germany and France dating back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French leadership saw an opportunity in the end of the war to weaken Germany vis-à-vis the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the WWI postwar settlement. [2] The original stipulations of the Versailles Treaty were designed to weaken Germany militarily, politically, and economically to ensure that it was not strong enough to attack France or its neighbors. Such conditions included demilitarization of areas such as the Rhineland or the Saar Valley, limitations on the size of the German military, monetary reparations, and loss of territory. [3] British Prime Minister Lloyd George, American President Woodrow Wilson, and the new German Weimar government, among o...