TEXT C The reek of the twin
towers’ rubble still permeated Lower Manhattan when Yaroslav Trofirnov’s editor
at The Wall Street Journal gave him an assignment that is the stuff of a foreign
correspondent’s fantasies: to travel through the lands of Islam and find out how
Muslims were reacting to America’s tragedy. Fluent in Arabic and carrying an
Italian passport, the Ukrainian-born Trofimov gained access to people who
wouldn’t speak to most Westerners, especially Americans. Over three years, he
met jihadists in Yemen, politicians in Bosnia, liberals in Tunisia, conservative
clerics in Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon, caravaneers in
mythic Timbuktu, and now gives us "Faith at War," part travel book, part
political and cultural commentary, part adventure story and altogether superb,
gracefully written guide into what he calls "the Islamic universe".
The cosmological description is apt: the countries Trofimov visited seem,
in their values, outlooks and aspirations, very distant from our own. "Faith at
War" serves as a kind of wormhole, through which we can enter that parallel
universe and begin to comprehend it. The news it brings will not comfort those
who believe that globalization is drawing us closer together. On his first stop,
Cairo, undergraduates dining in a McDonald’ s a few days after 9ll 1 demonstrate
that it’ s possible to delight in a Big Mac and in the fiery deaths of 3,000
Americans at the same time. "Everyone celebrated," an 18-year-old university
student gushes as she dips her fries into ketchup, "cheering that America
finally got what it deserved." This and similar encounters lead
Trofimov to conclude that poverty is not the root cause of Islamic extremism:
"Often those with the most bloodthirsty ideas were the well-to-do and the
privileged who have had some experience with the West -- and not the downtrodden
and ignorant ’ masses’ that are usually depicted as the font of anti-Western
fury." At his next destination, Saudi Arabia, Trofimov sips tea
with a dissident who echoes a mantra of the Bush administration -- the Middle
East’s repressive regimes are responsible for terrorism, and the key to
defeating it is to democratize the region. The country’s justice minister,
though, tells him that democracy is "un- Islamic". Some of
Trofimov’ s material is, unfortunately, dated, especially in the chapters
dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqi Shiite leaders express deep antipathy
to the United States ("Even if you turn this country into heaven, we don’t want
it from you," says one); he might hear different opinions now that a Shiite
dominated government is more or less in place. Trofimov’s
episodic narrative creates a mosaic of the Muslim universe, which is less
monolithic than generally pictured. Each tile is exquisitely wrought, but the
overall pattern is not always clear. Trofimov implies that in the eyes of a
great many Muslims, what began as a war against terrorism has morphed into a war
against Islam-- a clash of civilizations. But Muslims in more moderate countries
like Tunisia and Mali don’t seem to share that view, and I for one couldn’t tell
which vision is likely to prevail. That said, this book deserves
a wide readership. The Muslims don’t understand us, we don’t understand them.
"Faith at War" goes a long way toward solving the second part of that dismal
equation. According to Trofimov, who most often do harbor the extremist ideas