BANKING ON BAGHDAD: INSIDE IRAQ’S 7,000-YEAR HISTORY OF WAR, PROFIT AND CONFLICT

BANKING ON BAGHDAD: INSIDE IRAQ’S 7,000-YEAR HISTORY OF WAR, PROFIT AND CONFLICT By EDWIN BLACK [John Wiley & Sons, NJ, 496pp, 2004]

EDWIN BLACK takes a lot of time to thank his thirty-member research team, which allegedly checked and re-checked his facts till no more checking could be done. Thus it is all the more unfortunate that this obese book contains not the errors of the one, but of the many. Minor gripes are smaller in number, but still call into question Black’s erudition. For example, the last Ottoman siege of Vienna failed in 1683, not 1863. (Otherwise, we might bank on an Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 2073.) More worrisome, however, is Black’s undeniable hostility towards Islam, no insignificant part of Iraq’s most recent millennium of history. Black declares it “clear” that Islam is both “cruel” and “violent,” and this in his introduction! Such presumption is not based on any analysis of Islam as a religion with primarily moral, spiritual and psychological concerns, but rather the infighting of the post-Prophetic “Moslem” elites. By which I mean to say, Black reduces the Islamic enterprise, in the manner of a politicized extremist, to the exploits of Amir Timur and the Ottoman Sultan Yavuz Selim.

You might find yourself standing in the bookstore, facing the reassuring maroon spine of this title. But you would be facing the wrong choice; you would do much better to move on, perhaps towards a title informed by deep knowledge of Islam, the Middle East and current philosophies of history, rather than Orientalist negativity and unscholarly sloth. Might I suggest a maxim: The more the author tells you how much he knows, and how very hard he tried …