Disordered World
Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Born into a Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, acclaimed writer Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after 20 years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture East and West-joining them with a fierce moral clarity and a fluid, propulsive style.
In this "disordered world" of ours, Maalouf argues, the human race faces any number of urgent threats: climate change, global financial crisis, humanitarian disasters. Yet these threats have not united us. In fact, tensions are rising between the Arab world and the West. This is not, Maalouf maintains, a "clash of civilizations." We lack ideological debate because there seems to be no common ground on which to start discussion. Rather, our civilizations are exhausted, declined into moral incompetence. The West has betrayed its enlightenment values, even as it pushes democracy abroad. The Arab world, nostalgic for its golden era, has rushed toward radicalism. Maalouf eruditely examines a century of confrontations between our cultures, from the secularization of Turkey under Ataturk, through Nasser and the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the Camp David Accords and the assassination of Sadat, and the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
We keep adapting, Maalouf argues, our ancestral prejudices for contemporary scenarios. But in a voice that is intelligent, impassioned, and remarkably hopeful, Maalouf imagines that in the face of common challenges, we might just invent a new conception of the world we all share.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Lebanese Christian now living in Paris, Maalouf (The Rock of Tanios) writes, "We have embarked on a new century without a compass," and his polemic breezes over a grab bag of topics, from the idea of political legitimacy to Nasser, the catastrophe of the Six-Day War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration to climate change, arguing in every sphere for tolerance, respect for diversity, and democratic values. Focusing most intently on the Arab and Muslim world (the book, published originally in France in 2009, lacks any discussion of the revolutions now underway in the Arab world) and on how identity has replaced ideology in fueling conflict and its devastating consequences Maalouf does not reach the poetic or philosophic heights of his previous works, though his signature perspective, at once particular and universal, at home in an adopted land and blurring the boundaries between the Self and the Other, shines through. It makes for a startlingly lyrical take on geopolitics: "my approach will rather be that of a nightwatchman in a garden in the small hours after a storm when another more violent storm looms on the horizon."
