A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson

I reviewed this book before meeting Johnson in person at a public conversation we had at UC Irvine. His book is a highly readable — suspenseful, even — history of the Islamic Center in Germany and the United States’ role in creating it during the Cold War. Here’s the review, which was originally published by Zócalo Public Square:

Reading nonfiction is not usually an adventure the way reading fiction can be. It is more often an intellectual exercise that rarely enters the realm of imagination. A Mosque in Munich does both. It starts with a cast of characters, is scaffolded by a translation of Goethe’s “Ginko Biloba”, and takes off on a winding narrative stemming from the author’s curiosity in a bookstore of radical Islamic literature.

The Islamic Center of Munich was built 30 years before the U.S. began enlisting Muslims to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But Ian Johnson’s investigative history of the mosque unveils a surreptitious attempt to use Islam as a weapon in the Cold War long before it was stated policy.

In World War II, an estimated 250,000 Muslim minorities from the Soviet Union surrendered to the Nazis and fought against Stalin’s regime. Many of them ended up in Munich after the war, where Britain, the United States, and West Germany vied to turn them into agents for their own causes by bolstering an Islamic revival. Under Truman and Eisenhower “covert operations weren’t to be limited to the communist world but would include the ‘free world’ as well,” Johnson writes. “Put less euphemistically, the U.S. government would secretly manipulate public opinion at home and in scores of other noncommunist countries.”

In the 1950s, the CIA spent half a billion dollars per year in covert propaganda efforts to subvert the Soviet Union from the inside. Muslim exiles were key to the plan; they were given jobs with the front operation Radio Liberty, traveled under cover on pilgrimage to Mecca to influence Soviets visiting the holy site, and were sent with press credentials to conferences and meetings to counter communist ideology. CIA support propped up leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the globalized political Islamic movement which has been accused of having terrorist ties. By the time the mosque in Munich was built, it was a stronghold for the Brotherhood’s network in the West.

A Mosque in Munich is an eye-opener about the depth of U.S. policies on using religion. But it is also a packed narrative with complicated characters whose motives are never clear-cut. It is a fast-paced read with action in every sentence. The story is told in vivid detail, and attributions and sources — which are impressively robust — are saved for a 50-plus page section at the end of the book. Johnson approaches history as a journalist, seeking not only to uncover facts but to get to know characters, who show us how much the world can change because of the idealism, greed, fear or egos of a handful of people.

In his prologue, Johnson writes, “I wondered what remains of a life when it is stripped of a public identity.” The intrigue and tenacity of A Mosque in Munich gives those lives, the intelligence agents and the Muslims in Munich after World War II, a captivating retelling in a book worthwhile for politically-inclined and plot-driven readers alike.

The Muslim Brotherhood edited by Barry Rubin

This is a collection of essays about a transnational movement. It’s uneven in quality and, particularly in the essay about North America, at times needlessly alarmist and not well-sourced. In light of allegations surrounding Park51, though, this text shows that The Muslim Brotherhood is not a monolith of evil. In fact, it’s not a monolith of anything. Its incarnations all over the world are highly independent and have very different goals, which makes any “guilty by association” claim difficult to sustain. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

The movement began in the 1920s in Egypt, with the original purpose of elevating the role of Islam. Today, thanks in part to its members migrating around the world, it’s a loose global network of political opposition parties, social groups and scholarly institutes. The essayists, mostly scholars, vacillate between taking an even, careful tone and proscribing the decades-old group’s existence outside Egypt.

But they also take the more crucial step of explaining what this movement is not. The Brotherhood is not a top-down, tight network — a very important difference from the jihadist groups that dominate American news. While Muslim Brotherhood-affiliates are all influenced by major ideologues, they “operate in silos,” independently responding to local conditions and often engaging in existing institutions with the hope of influencing them from the inside. They focus on local issues — participating in elections and slating candidates in Jordan and Egypt — while jihadists such as al-Qa’ida focus on their obsessions with the West. While not opposed to violence, they do not see the use of force as a particularly effective way to reach their goals, with a few exceptions. One Brotherhood member who serves as an Egyptian parliamentarian said that he supports the activities of jihadist groups, but calls those who kill other Muslims murderers.

Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution by Salman Ahmad

If you’re looking for a light read to help you understand that Islam is not a monolith — and one that comes with great beats — this is your book. It’s no literary masterpiece, but the in-text soundtrack is wonderful and this is a great companion to Ahmad’s own music with his band Junoon, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Which is certainly refreshing in a book about Pakistan, immigration and Islam. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Ahmad’s writing is much like his music — it carries a simple, consistent rhythm and alternates between pop sensibility and diary-like expositions. His childhood memories and quick takes on politics and history mingle with surreal celebrity stories — playing cricket with Imran Khan, taking Mick Jagger to a red light district, meeting Princess Diana at a dinner party.

A son of Lahore, Ahmad spent six formative years in America, where he bought his first guitar and joined a high school band in a small town on the fringes of New York City. His family returned to Pakistan in 1981, to an urbane and elite life. Ahmad trained as a doctor but never pursued a career in medicine. The first time he performed in Lahore, when he was in college, his guitar was smashed by a member of a student wing of a Pakistani religious party. From then on, Ahmad’s musical career survived the dictatorship of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who implemented conservative Islamic laws and restricted music and culture, and the corrupt back-and-forth leadership of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Changing political whims presented challenges — from death threats to distribution blocks — to a rocker trying to introduce something new in Pakistan.

At its best, however, this is not a political history. Ahmad is often forthright with his opinions, but Rock & Roll Jihad is most interesting when its politics are more subtle. Ahmad’s boyhood stories, for example, are more powerful than his direct commentaries. He recalls holidays in Swat Valley, before the Taliban takeover, and a college brawl he witnessed between Sunnis and Shias, whose distinctions meant very little to his Sufi grandmother. These parts of Ahmad’s story beg a reconsideration of now-loaded words like jihad and taliban, and inspire an urge to get lost in the haunting music of Sufism.

Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland by Stephan Salisbury

Last but not least, I just finished a review of Mohamed’s Ghost. The review has not yet been published, but in short, this is a book that offers a timely reminder of how our country treated Muslims, Middle Easterners, South Asians, Africans, and war on terror critics after 9/11.  It reminds us what fear makes us forget about the diversity of America, what fear makes us forget about individual rights. I can’t share the review, but here is one line that might make you interested in the book: Salisbury writes, “Freedom threatened leads defenders to threaten freedom.” And I write, “In truth, Salisbury is haunted by the stories of the Muslims he reported on in Philadelphia. The import of this book is clear: before we rush to judge, we should allow ourselves to be haunted as well.”

UPDATE: Here’s the full review that ran on Aug. 30.

(poster by Maritess Santiago)

If you have any questions for Mr. Johnson, please leave them in comments.

I wrote a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review last year about Sri Lanka’s broken judiciary — the the emergency rules that extend executive power, violence against attorneys, and the inaccessibility of legal counsel, particularly for those from the embattled North. Much has changed on the island since the end of major conflict between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) last year, but judicial and constitutional problems still plague the country. The piece I wrote about this was a bit long [PDF] so here’s an excerpt:

Just before his retirement in June, Sri Lanka’s former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva made unambiguous remarks about the state of the judiciary in Sri Lanka. At an event marking the opening of a new courthouse, he said that the IDPs [internally displaced persons] are being held in deplorable conditions and predicted their claims would not be heard in Sri Lankan courts. “They cannot expect justice from the law of the country,” Mr. Silva said.

The new Supreme Court Chief Justice Asoka de Silva, then, has a weighty task on his shoulders. He is taking the helm of an institution marked by the public’s waning confidence in the rule of law in relation to human rights. “Where the bench is concerned, it is my view that it forms the backbone of any civilized society,” he said. “If at any time, the bench is compromised, society begins to deteriorate from within and will end in anarchy.”

Those looking for justice in the courts are hoping that Supreme Court Chief Justice de Silva and the country’s leaders will be dedicated to that cause. In the absence of such reform, the legacy of Sri Lanka’s long war will be difficult to overcome.

…

Even if a detainee or an IDP is heard in court, Basil Fernando, executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission, said fundamental rights petitions are rarely successful for the thousands being held for questioning about connections to the LTTE…In addition to long delays, those cases often go up against broad emergency regulations that give the government immense powers to detain terrorism suspects. At the end of August, the Supreme Court addressed the fundamental rights application of a young Tamil man from the north whohas been detained without charge for 17 months. The three-person bench, including Chief Justice de Silva, gave the attorney general and defense secretary four weeks to review their detention policy. Mr. Fernando says that this will not help detainees, however. The Supreme Court could have ruled on the validity of present laws, but instead passed its powers to members of the executive branch.

I wonder if these recent adjustments on the part of the current government are meant to restore some power to the judiciary, or if they simply show that the courts will still not be deciding what is and is not constitutional.  Will these concessions make a real difference to the lives of detainees? Will they help to heal the wounds of a long and bitter civil war? Some answers might come from the reality of the limitations to the actions of Parliament: The BBC reported that “those already detained under the emergency regulations will be kept in custody – they include more than 11,000 rebel suspects still to be charged. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, a draconian law separate from the emergency measures, is also to remain in force.”

My exploration of how health and global conflict collide is not new, but I am beginning to think about it in news ways. This week, Zócalo Public Square ran my review of War and the Health of Nations, a dissertation-turned-book by political scientist Zaryab Iqbal. Here’s a piece of the review, which explains some of the findings of her study:

“The 1991 Gulf War destroyed Iraq’s high quality public health facilities. Child mortality surged from 257 to 1,536 per 100,000 children from 1990 to 1995. Typhoid cases increased more than tenfold, according to the World Health Organization. Iqbal’s research seeks to quantify these kinds of effects of conflict on public health using statistical data. She relies heavily on World Health Organization Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) records, which count the average number of healthy years rather than simple life expectancy.

A causal relationship is difficult to establish — countries in conflict tend to have an array of social problems that affect health — but the correlation is strong. Comparing data from 1999 to 2005, she found that place with conflicts or conflicts in the previous year have dramatically lower HALEs. People in those countries have about eight years less of healthy living compared to countries without conflict. Each year of conflict a country endures, she found, costs its population about five healthy months on average. Looking back 40 years, before the World Health Organization began tracking HALE, Iqbal found that fertility and infant mortality rates increased, while life expectancy decreased in major conflicts, where more than 1,000 people die in a year, and also in protracted minor conflicts with at least 25 deaths in a year. She also found that on average, government spending on health decreased by 21 percent in years with major conflicts.”

This week, doctors and students, academics and activists, gathered at the War & Global Health conference in Seattle. I’m just now digging into the wealth of content on the site, but, as it turns out, there are a lot of studies geared toward showing that conflict has serious public health consequences beyond casualties — not news to anyone who has lived in a conflict zone, but the numbers can be startling. Reporter Tom Paulson had an interesting take on the conference, and helps to prevent the oversimplification of “war is bad for your health”: “Most of those attending the conference clearly shared the bias that war is bad for health. Since the meeting was co-organized by UW students, I searched in vain for someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt so I could ask if war could ever be good for health, if fought to improve social welfare (Cuba does have some pretty good health stats).” Paulson also highlights studies that show that even in victorious countries, public health suffers from conflict.

I’m continuing to dive into the research — my next Zócalo review will be about James Mittleman’s new book Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity, which explores how our connectivity affects our security. As always, I’m looking for more to read to give myself a base to be a better reporter. Suggestions welcome.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
By Barbara Demick

As Barbara Demick introduces it, North Korea is quite literally a dark spot in East Asia. At night the country goes black. From space, it looks like a hole surrounded by the electrified cities in South Korea, China and Japan. “When outsiders stare into the void that is today’s North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached,” Demick writes. “But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of development.”

Demick addresses this darkness and the history that felled a once progressing nation, but Nothing to Envy is particularly compelling when it’s personal. Demick tells stories of North Koreans with whom Americans can empathize. Six real people fall in love, start businesses, and fight with their mothers —  all while struggling with hunger and brutal politics and, eventually, refugee life. It is a cinematic book, reminiscent at once of an epic war film and John Hersey’s classic reportage in Hiroshima.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
By Peter Hessler

Country Driving begins with a driver’s license. It is the story of rapid change in China’s diverse landscapes — dying villages, growing villages, and booming factory towns — joined by highways and an ever increasing number of cars. “By the summer of 2001, when I applied to the Beijing Public Safety Traffic Bureau, I had lived in China for five years,” Peter Hessler writes. “During that time I had traveled passively by bus and plane, boat and train; I dozed across provinces and slept through towns. But sitting behind the wheel woke me up.”

The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman

It is not particularly surprising that a ubiquitous literary critic finds our growing e-mail culture soul-crushing. John Freeman was a freelance writer before becoming the editor of Granta, the century-old literary magazine. He is dedicated to books, to narrative, to all things that pithy online interactions are not.

So it is also not surprising that The Tyranny of E-mail is a slow and reasoned plea for, well, slow and reasoned communication. It begins with a lament for inky love letters and continues on a lyrical history of the written word delivered, from the kings and generals who sent news on horses and pigeons to the revolutionizing speed of the telegram. Freeman connects today’s common e-mail problems — flaming, spam and privacy — with similar issues wrought by the creation of an affordable postal service.

Here’s the published blurbs about these events, but let me know if you want more information or if you have thoughts about what we should cover:

Writing in the Internet Age: The Future of Publishing and How to Capitalize on the Digital Revolution

The web is giving rise to unique forms of expression and providing writers with an unprecedented opportunity to connect with potential readers and promote their work in ways unimaginable even five years ago. Literary agents now urge clients to blog at least five hours a week; publishers expect writers to increase their visibility through websites, social networking blogs, audio podcasts, and online clips.  For beginning writers and mid-career professionals alike, this one-day seminar explores the future of publishing and how to capitalize on the new opportunities in the digital age, including how to develop an online identity that can help build your individual brand and enable you to tap into the extensive network of online communities that will be natural audiences for your work. The course also covers creating websites that showcase your writing talent and professional skills and using social media to expand and improve your professional life, increase your visibility and income, and build a reader base.

Moderator:  Linda Marsa is a former staff writer for Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor for Discover and is writing a book on global warming.  She also has written for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Los Angeles, Playboy, Popular Science, Utne Reader, Financial Times, Reader’s Digest, and Mother Jones and is the author of Prescription for Profits. She received the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing, 1999.

China in the World

China Beat is co-sponsoring a dialogue between Angilee Shah and Ian Johnson, to be held at UC Irvine on June 7 (more details to come as the date draws closer). Shah has previously written for us about China-India matters, among other topics, and is currently posting (at her website) about her recent monthlong stay in Indonesia. Johnson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China, will publish A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West in early May. A schedule of his other tour dates and locations can be found here; you can also read an interview with him from the early days of China Beat.

Jacqueline invited me to go back once more, this time to delve into religion in Indonesia. There are so many little known facts about this dynamic place. It is the fourth most populated country in the world, and largest majority-Muslim country in the world. While it is difficult to get an accurate count, the number of Muslims in Indonesia is as many as, perhaps more than, the Muslim populations of all Arab countries combined.

We spent the month exploring the diverse religious practices of this country. Islam does not just come in the Saudi Arabian brand so ubiquitous in the American press, and a visit to Indonesia makes that fact clear almost immediately. We wanted to know what the future of religion looks like in Indonesia, and how the rest of the world might incorporate the diversity of the country into their often limited views of Islam.

There was never a dull day. I knew there would be no boiler plate explanation for how this country has changed in the last decade, and no easy answer to questions about where it will go next. But every outing and meeting brought something unexpected. We sought out a faith healer and found a very successful business man.  We visited a megamillion dollar mosque and a church that has found a comfortable home in a megamall. From suburban police officers to leaders of liberal thinking, transvestites to Islamic schoolgirls, Indonesia challenged us and challenged our expectations constantly.

I am going to write about the people and places Jacqueline and I saw bit by bit, but I’d like to introduce these stories with a familiar image across Southeast Asia, the kinds of things that I think make this region of the world spectacular.

Near the end of our stay in Jakarta, the traffic and concrete, the constant sounds of honking pierced by distorted calls to prayer from mosques on every corner began to ring in our heads. We got away for one weekend and chose a place neither of us knew much about. But we wanted something decidedly different from the city. If there is a place  that feels far away from Jakarta in Indonesia, it’s Batu Karas.

Click to see a larger map

In Batu Karas, things just go easier. The food is simple, the businesses cooperative, and the lifestyle  laid back. You can walk the main street in 20 minutes or make a friend and hop on the back of their two-wheeler for a quicker ride. There is not much to do for a visitor except appreciate the world and have drinks and meals, surf and enjoy the black-sand beaches.

Batu Karas is a fish and surf town on the south coast of Java. Small mosques dot the coastline every few miles, emitting glowing lights when the call to prayer is sung at dusk. On a beach that was hit by a tsunami in 2006 — Indonesians all have tales to tell about battling natural disasters — local people, most of whom have day jobs in the rice fields or small construction projects, work together to pull in a large net, in a kind of around-the-world cooperative system. Women in straw hats and hijab — the headscarves worn by many Indonesians usually cover the hair and neck and come in bright colors — connect hooks to the ropes and walk backwards from the ocean until they run out of space, unhook and return to the front of the line. Men join the rotation and eventually walk into the ocean for the hard work of pulling the saturated nets, full of fish,  from the water.

The group shares most of the catch for their own kitchens and the proceeds from what they sell goes to the owner of the nets. The smallest fish make sambal, a kind of chili sauce, while the larger fish are used in main courses. They discard the “funny ones” and the blowfish, tossing them onto the sand. We buy a small bag of small fish for less than US$1.

Three of those books have been about American foreign policy in the Middle East. To be sure, the three were very different in style and content, but in so many ways they all underscore the simple need for context.  It is a desperate need in these days of information overload and soundbite news. While the foreign policy histories and opinions in the books that I reviewed are essential for thinking about monumental existential issues like national security, the act of consistently reading books is a reminder to take more time to think about, well, everything. Sometimes it’s best that life move at the speed of books.

Here are some excerpts and links in case you’re interested.

On Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune:

Americans’ view of Iran has certainly evolved since President George Bush declared the rogue nation a part of his “Axis of Evil.” Mild-mannered American travel guide Rick Steves explored “the most surprising and fascinating land he’s ever visited” for an hour-long PBS special in the summer. “Daily Show” correspondent Jason Jones spent a week there before the elections, satirizing the media’s narrow portrayal of the country. And if a backpacker and a comedian are not enough, Americans got a more direct view of the aspirations of Iranian people on Twitter and Facebook, as the middle class led the charge against what they saw as a fraudulent election.

If the discourse on Iran has changed, so too should the focus of America’s foreign policy. Vali Nasr outlines the ways in which we have misunderstood the rise of Islam in the Middle East and advocates for a paradigm shift in Forces of Fortune.

On Stephen P. Cohen’s Beyond America’s Grasp:

It is essential, as the saying goes, to “know thine enemy.” Citizen diplomat and social psychologist Stephen P. Cohen has a different message: Know thine history.

From the prologue, Cohen’s book is jam-packed with facts. He covers the 100 years of diplomatic history between the United States and countries of the Middle East, detailing exhaustively the political events that affected American relations with Middle Eastern nations. Beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s anti-imperialist stance in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Beyond America’s Grasp chronicles the let-downs and mistakes that have created relationships of distrust.

And lastly, on Lloyd C. Gardner’s Three Kings:

President Barack Obama’s months of deliberation on Afghanistan — which culminated in an announcement earlier this month of a troop surge — has been a fascinating process for the many pundits and critics who poke holes in his strategy. To be a fly on the wall in Oval Office conversations about national security and military strategy in the Middle East….

But very few could sneak into that party.

The curious might find some satisfaction in Lloyd C. Gardner’s Three Kings, a history of closed door meetings and great debate that surrounded presidents’ — albeit not this President’s — policies in the Middle East.

In 2006, Warren Buffet made a $31 billion gift to the Gates Foundation. He explained the generous donation this way: “A market system has not worked in terms of poor people.”

R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, the dean and a senior lecturer at Columbia Business School, turn Buffet’s assertion on its head in The Aid Trap. Free markets, they say, are not the cause of poverty. Indeed, the market system and strong private business sectors are the solution to poverty.

“The market has not worked in poor countries because it never had the chance,” Hubbard and Duggan write.

For those who feel good about their charitable contributions, The Aid Trap is not an easy idea to stomach: The food and clothes and medicine rich countries send to poor countries, the money they put in the hands of government programs, even the wells enterprising students dig in villages during their summer vacations — this kind of long-accepted charity does very little to alleviate poverty. In fact, flooding the market with free goods makes it difficult for local businesses to compete and provides incentives for governments to maintain the status quo.

You can read the whole review at Zócalo. Hubbard and Duggan make a compelling argument to change the way we look at charity. Zócalo is dedicated to increasing public discourse, so please do weigh in and comment. I’ll be writing reviews regularly. The next review will be on Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune.

Learning from Lai Changxing?

Last year, Angilee Shah wrote a review at China Beat of Oliver August’s Inside the Red Mansion. The review inspired Simon Fraser University Professor Jeremy Brown to assign the text to a class and he recently invited the book’s protaganist, Lai Changxing, to join his class for a day. Brown and one of his students provide an account of the day’s visit below…

I enjoy writing book reviews, but it never occurred to me that readers might take any action other than a trip to their local library or bookstore. It certainly never occurred to me that Lai might agree to being questioned by a classroom full of students. I only wish I could have been there.

Luckily, Prof. Brown and his student, Xian Wang, provide a nice summary. If you haven’t heard of Lai Changxing, I highly recommend this post and August’s book. Here’s a bit more from Brown and Wang:

In his responses to student questions, Lai alternated between innocent charm and aggrieved combativeness. He denied giving officials cash-filled briefcases and providing them with modern-day concubines. But he admitted that he actively sought out and took advantage of loopholes. In order to avoid customs duties when importing oil and luxury cars to China, Lai said that he had his oil tankers unload when nobody was watching. His overarching goal was to make more money, he said, so he was constantly looking for opportunities. When local officials announced that new businesses would be exempt from taxes for three years, Lai opened a series of ventures, and then shut them down and changed their names before they hit the three year mark, managing to perpetually avoid taxes.

Thanks again to the folks at the China Beat for facilitating such rich conversations.