A New Start

FT: The playwright who became president

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

===

The playwright who became president

By Stefan Wagstyl

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

Always a shy man, Václav Havel shuffles into view as if, even in his own office, he feels uncertain of his surroundings.

Years of fame as a dissident writer, anti-communist revolutionary and president of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic do not seem to have robbed the 71-year-old philosopher-king of his natural diffidence.

His welcome is warm but a little hesitant. His handshake is restrained. His voice, gravelled by decades of smoking that ended in lung cancer, is so gentle that it is hard to imagine him delivering the hundreds of speeches that he has made.

And yet the moment the conversation begins he comes alive. It is as if the mind inside this frail body has energy far bigger than the frame in which it is confined. He listens intently, pauses before speaking and shapes his answers with deliberate care - plus occasional flashes of the wit that brought him early acclaim as a playwright.

We sit down at a stylish cherry-red table in a space carved out of a period building in Prague's historic centre. It is a selfconsciously modern office with glass bookshelves and walls hung with contemporary art. Havel wears jeans and an open-necked blue shirt. Around him are scores of books in Czech, German and English.

Coffee is served - a mug for Havel and a delicate china cup for me - and a plate of chocolate biscuits that go untouched. I had asked to meet in a restaurant for lunch, but was told this would be difficult because Havel is so well known that we would be constantly interrupted.

I quiz Havel about his pictures. He says they are largely gifts he received as president and points to a colourful Buddhist tapestry. "There are small things here. But what is important is this carpet. It is a gift from the Dalai Lama, and only seven people all around the world have this kind of carpet," says Havel.

For many other public figures this would be a boast. But for Havel it is a statement of the obvious: his time as president transformed his life into what he calls "a fairytale" in which extraordinary events such as meetings with the Dalai Lama, not to mention Pope John Paul II, the Clintons and Robert Redford, became ordinary.

This year Havel published an English edition of his recollections of his presidency, entitled To the Castle and Back . It is not so much a memoir as a series of commentaries, interspersed with contemporan-eous office notes and entries from a diary he kept in 2005 while working on the book. President Havel worries about everything from the future of the planet to the half-cooked potatoes served to the visiting Emperor of Japan and the bat that has taken up residence in his summer house. "In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it? The light bulb has been unscrewed so as not to wake it up and upset it."

As he leaves the castle for the last time, he wonders about what happens to an ex-president in a country with little experience of ex-presidents. He writes: "I have to smile to myself when I realise that people don't know how to address me. Some say 'Mr President', others say 'Mr former President', some say 'Mr Havel' and it's only a matter of time before someone addresses me as 'Mr former Havel.'"

He also worries about the failure of ex-communist states to complete the revolutions of 1989 by reforming what he calls post-communism - the domination of former communists in positions of economic power. I ask him how the reform of post-communism is progressing. He says the fight is still on, with victories in popular revolts in Ukraine and Georgia and more sedate gains in central Europe. "As the young generation grows up, society needs to rid itself of the power of the people deformed by communism, people who had succeeded in quickly establishing themselves in the new regimes and in occupying various powerful positions."

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

Pointing to a mobile phone, he says: "Fifty years ago, I wouldn't have imagined this little device could be used to make calls all over the world, to make video recordings, and to send images. If someone had told me about this then, I would have thought the future world would be a wonderful one when people would have these things and would be able to communicate better. But that didn't happen. The world today is worse, and it is full of more traps and contradictions than it was 50 years ago."

I am shocked to hear him go this far. Surely, at least in ex-communist central Europe, the world is incomparably better than it was 50 years ago? Havel answers patiently: "Yes, of course it is a good thing that the Iron Curtain fell and that communism ended, but that still doesn't mean that the world is a better place. The big differences between the developed world and the developing world are deeper than ever. The unifying forces of globalisation incite various forms of chauvinism or nationalism. Terrorists almost have the capacity to fire nuclear missiles. The world is full of various dangers, including ecological ones in the form of climate change, and so on."

He continues: "I'd say that it is a good thing that the world is no longer divided in two, but new superpowers are emerging, and who knows what this will bring? China today is more powerful than Russia. Russia is witnessing the rise of a strange, special sort of dictatorship with strong imperialist demands, albeit dressed more elegantly than before."

I ask Havel why, in his book, he is so rude about his fellow Czechs. He writes of the "bitter provincialism" of the "little Czechs". Elsewhere he writes: "What they [Czechs] consider ideal is the capacity to enjoy various blessings - as far as possible with no struggle, no work and no cost."

Although Havel does not say so, a prime exponent of "little Czech" politics is the Eurosceptic Václav Klaus, his rival and successor as Czech president. Havel describes in his book how the Thatcherite Klaus made an uneasy political companion for Havel and other mainstream liberals who led 1989's "Velvet Revolution". When Havel became president and Klaus prime minister, Klaus's well-known arrogance caused repeated conflicts even over the most trivial incidents, such as Havel's decision to express officially his regrets at the death of Frank Zappa. Havel writes that Klaus would have been "happiest if I had submitted everything to him in advance for approval".

Despite these barbs, many Czechs are disappointed the book does not say more about the Havel-Klaus relationship. Havel says: "I am very much opposed to reducing the last 20 years of our history to personal tiffs between myself and Václav Klaus. And I don't like it when people get the impression that I did nothing but fight with him. I don't like that, and it doesn't reflect reality."

Havel denies that Leaving , the first play he has written since the end of communism, has anything to do with Klaus, even though many Czechs think it has. The work concerns a leader who has lost power but is reluctant to admit it and refuses to surrender his official residence to a successor named Vlastik Klein. Havel insists he conceived the idea in 1988, before the Velvet Revolution.

I ask Havel about his controversial second wife, the actress Dagmar Veskrnová. Many Czechs were upset when Havel married Ms Veskrnova, his long-standing girlfriend, in 1997 in what they saw as indecent haste within months of the death of his first wife, the widely admired Olga Havlová. I suggest that having become a moral authority far beyond his country's borders, he might have behaved with greater care. He shoots back: "Yes, but even a moral authority has the right to marry a second wife when his first wife dies, no? It was about something else . . . These campaigns [against Dagmar] had a strange element of jealousy, as though the public felt abandoned or betrayed when I remarried, as if society were an abandoned lover. It's an interesting phenomenon."

We turn to Europe. Havel, a passionate pro-European, is keen that the European Union's constitutional treaty should be kept alive despite its rejection in the recent Irish referendum. He is convinced the EU will muddle through, and, ignoring President Klaus's misgivings, says the Czech Republic should press on with ratification. Only then, he believes, should the EU consider a simpler treaty: "It would be best now to quietly select some three or four people who could create a beautiful, simple constitution that children could learn about at school."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

A last question. Has he, I ask, since he is photographed on the cover of his book with a cigarette in hand, stuck to his promise to stop smoking? "I haven't smoked in 12 years," he says, "but about 40 times a day I feel like having a cigarette."

Stefan Wagstyl is the FT's eastern Europe editor. 'To the Castle and Back' (Portobello Books, £20). To buy it for the special FT Bookshop price of £16 plus P&P, call: 0870-429 5884.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Girls Allowed

Excerpt

After the karate class, five teenagers – between them they have won championships in Qatar, Malaysia, Slovenia and Italy – describe why they love karate. Like teenage girls everywhere, they break into fits of giggles and insist that someone else answers first.

“It makes me feel really tough and strong,” says Farnaz, a bespectacled 14-year-old who wears a headscarf when she practises, even though it is not required in this women-only centre. “And it’s also good for my physical wellbeing.”

“Yeah,” chime in the other girls, laughing and prodding each other. These girls are Iran’s next generation, who travel abroad and who have dreams that don’t involve weddings, or at least not yet.

All five name maths or science as their favourite subjects. “I want to be like Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi,” says Farnaz, referring to the famous Iranian scholar from the Middle Ages, the father of chemistry and mathematics. Zakiyeh, also 14, pitches in: “I like Marie Curie.”

= = =

Girls allowed

By Anna Fifield

Published: April 18 2008 20:11 | Last updated: April 18 2008 20:11

On a dingy suburban street in southern Tehran, cats pick daintily through piles of rubbish, and black-swathed women walk past low-hanging electrical wires and graffiti-decorated walls. Anonymous among them, Zohreh fits the western image of the repressed Iranian woman. Not a strand of hair strays from her headscarf, and she tops her scarf and coat with a head-to-toe black chador.

But inside her small, immaculate apartment it becomes clear that life for Zohreh – as for the vast majority of Iranian women – is much more complicated than the western world believes. “Of course you know Iranian women normally win at home,” she laughs. A large woman, she wears her dyed brown-and-blonde hair in long layers. Her black trousers and brown patterned top are accented by a big gold pendant.

“I don’t feel restricted in any way,” she says, carefully peeling a kiwi taken from a huge fruit platter she brought out from the kitchen. “I think that everywhere in the world, even in countries where there is talk about freedom and democracy, you can always find women who are oppressed in some way. And here in Iran there are women who can equal 10 men in terms of decision-making and being strong.”

Zohreh married at 16, and a decade later remains very happy. Her parents were reluctant to see her wed at an early age. But when she set eyes on Mustafa, in a carefully engineered meeting, she knew that her neighbour’s uncle was the right husband for her. “It wasn’t only his appearance – although I really like tall men with broad chests – it was his character too,” she says. Twelve years older than Zohreh, he explained during those first meetings that they would move into one of the rooms in his two-room family house, and she would help care for his mother, who lived in the other room.

Zohreh considers herself lucky. “I have a very good relationship with my husband and I think I have a very successful marriage. We have some kind of special chemistry. He got married late because it took him that long to find the right woman.”

She would love to have a job, but her husband will not let her work anywhere she might come into contact with men. “Although my husband has some prejudices, he also wants me to make progress,” she says, describing how she has been going to hairdressing classes and will soon receive her qualification. “Mustafa says he will buy me a shop and all the equipment so that I can have my own salon. And only women could come,” she says.

What’s startling about ordinary Iranian women like Zohreh is how accepting they are of their lives. They seem to be the inheritors of an age-old, traditional way of married life. But the traditions are very modern. Iran has had a women’s movement since the mid-1800s. Bibikhatoon Astarabadi founded the first school for girls and in 1895 published Failings of Men, the first declaration of women’s rights in Iran.

Iranian women started attending university in the 1930s, gained the right to vote in 1963 – earlier than in some European countries – and were a major force in the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. But the history of women in Iran is complicated. While the Shah was in power, women had more freedom and greater legal rights, but the openness in society led traditional families to keep their daughters at home because they did not want them living in that kind of modern society. With the revolution, women’s legal rights decreased markedly, and they were forced to wear the hejab, or Islamic cover. Ironically, this gave new opportunities to many young women who were previously kept at home. Veiled women from traditional families could study and work – to such an extent that women now comprise about two-thirds of university students, a level that has led to calls for quotas for men.

The hejab is the most obvious sign of the status of Iranian women. But for most women, having to cover hair and hips is the least of their worries. And so it is for me. Now that I have figured out how to keep my headscarf in place while eating and interviewing, my bigger concern is making sure I that I have the same access and opportunities as a male journalist. In the relatively short time I’ve been here, I’ve been struck by the dynamism and strength of Iranian women. Whether they are artists or government officials or everywoman like Zohreh, the people I have met have had a clear idea of what they want, and how to work around the system to get it.

Feminist activists suggest the current situation of women in Iran is part of the wider struggle to rebuild Iranian society after the trauma of the revolution and the war with Iraq in the 1980s. “Women have become like the canaries in the mine,” says Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the bestseller about women who gathered to secretly read banned novels in the Iranian capital. “If you want to know how much society is changing, look at the women.”

Although women began to feel more relaxed during Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency, things have changed since the arrival of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who was elected president in 2005 on a pledge to revive revolutionary values and who has initiated a widespread clampdown across society.

Ahmadi-Nejad’s government has been trying to quash discussions about women’s rights and has put down demonstrations using violence. (An 80-year-old poet was beaten at one rally). Following the parliamentary election last month, Ahmadi-Nejad will have to work with a more moderate – though still overwhelmingly conservative – legislature. But women performed miserably in the parliamentary election, with only a handful making the cut in the first round in March, suggesting that the next parliament will contain even fewer women than the previous one.

In the face of violent opposition and poor representations, women’s rights campaigners have adopted new tactics, and have launched a petition that aims to collect one million signatures calling for greater rights for women. Activists won’t say how many they have collected until they get to their target number (which rather suggests that the number is still low).

Nahid Keshavarz, 34, is one of the petition’s organisers. In her apartment, over chocolates and espresso, she tells me in a mix of French and Farsi that feminism is not just the preserve of Iran’s educated elite. She comes from a normal family – her father is a farmer, her mother a housewife – in the southern city of Bushehr. It was going to university that opened her eyes to the idea of women’s rights.

Now studying for a doctorate in women’s studies in France, she says that the women’s movement has grown stronger since the clampdowns. “When Ahmadi-Nejad became president a lot of people predicted that the women’s movement would be marginalised, but over the last two years the movement has shown surprising growth,” she says.

A year ago she was arrested and put into prison for two weeks for collecting signatures in Tehran’s Laleh Park. But even prison has a positive side. “Every time one of us gets arrested, the issues of women’s legal rights are taken deeper into society,” she says. “And when I was in prison, even the guard said to me ‘Hey, you, the feminist.’ The concept of feminism has now become so widely known that even male prison guards know what it is.”

Keshavarz was in a cell with 25 women, 10 of whom had killed their husbands. “The situation of these women helped us prove our point. Most of them had been married off at very young ages and had been in violent marriages. They had come from the margins of society, but neither society nor the law protected them – so they took matters into their own hands. For all of them, the killing of their husbands was their first crime.”

Keshavarz was released, but her trial – on charges of taking action against national security by distributing propaganda against the system – goes on. The trial has never been completed: the authorities just leave it hanging, a reminder that if she puts a foot wrong, the court system could easily swing back into action. She continues to collect signatures, though she says she has to be discreet, collecting in taxis, shops and hair salons, rather than in public places.

The campaign has taken the issue of women’s rights to very remote areas, with workshops in almost 20 regional cities, from Kurdistan in the north to the remote southern provinces. “Middle-class women like me can find a way round the laws, but they are unjust and have to be changed because they are applied more strictly to women in lower classes,” Keshavarz says.

“Take polygamy. That’s not so acceptable here in Tehran but in the border regions, it’s a big issue,” she says. “I went to a village in the south of Iran and I met all these young, beautiful women who signed the campaign petition, and their first priority was to abolish polygamy because it is so widespread in that area.”

Under Iranian law, girls are considered adults at the age of nine and can be tried as an adult and sentenced to death for murder from that age (boys do not legally become adults until 15). A woman’s testimony in court is worth half that of a man’s, and if a man and a woman are injured in an accident, the man gets double the punitive damages. Women receive only half the inheritance of men, and if a man dies without having children, his entire inheritance goes to his parents, not to his wife.

Although Morocco, Egypt and Turkey provide better protection for women, Iranian women still fare better than those in many countries in the Gulf. Women here have the right to vote, to drive, and to become members of parliament.

There have been some improvements in recent years. Women have won the right to custody of children until the age of seven. Previously, custody automatically went to the father in all circumstances.

Divorce reform is now the most pressing issue for many women’s rights activists. Men still have the exclusive right to end a marriage, except in specific circumstances or if it is expressly written into the marriage contract that the woman can herself seek a divorce.

In Zohreh’s apartment I ask her about these issues. She tells me she will receive 250 gold coins if Mustafa ever divorces her. But it did not occur to her to ask for the right to call an end to the marriage. “I didn’t even think about it. I think most Iranian girls are like that when they are getting married – they are thinking about love and being together forever, not getting divorced,” she says.

. . .

In the huge Zeitoon gymnasium in western Tehran, 25 women and girls in white karate suits – many of them tied with black belts – perform their warm-up.

“Ichi, ni, san, shi,” the teacher puffs, counting in Japanese as the girls kick their legs in the air, exhaling sharply as they do so. The girls, aged seven, take their routine as seriously as the women in their early twenties, stern faces checking their posture in the mirrors that line the practice hall.

Karate is one of the most popular female sports in Iran, and one of the few women’s sports to be shown on television. (Topped with a headscarf, the karate suit constitutes good Islamic covering.)

In the gym, women with bouffant hairdos and tiny lycra outfits listen to their iPods as they run on treadmills, while mothers in full chador sit knitting, waiting for their daughters to finish working out in their sports classes.

After the karate class, five teenagers – between them they have won championships in Qatar, Malaysia, Slovenia and Italy – describe why they love karate. Like teenage girls everywhere, they break into fits of giggles and insist that someone else answers first.

“It makes me feel really tough and strong,” says Farnaz, a bespectacled 14-year-old who wears a headscarf when she practises, even though it is not required in this women-only centre. “And it’s also good for my physical wellbeing.”

“Yeah,” chime in the other girls, laughing and prodding each other. These girls are Iran’s next generation, who travel abroad and who have dreams that don’t involve weddings, or at least not yet.

All five name maths or science as their favourite subjects. “I want to be like Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi,” says Farnaz, referring to the famous Iranian scholar from the Middle Ages, the father of chemistry and mathematics. Zakiyeh, also 14, pitches in: “I like Marie Curie.”

Asked about the prospect of their getting married, they shriek, almost in unison, “We’re too young.”

“There are still more important things for us to think about,” Zakiyeh says. “I’m not saying I don’t want to get married, just that it’s not an issue for us now.”

These girls in the gym represent the activists’ best hope. Political change may be hard, but demographic change is unstoppable. Seventy per cent of the 70 million population is under 30 years old. The potential collective power of young people to resist regulations they do not like – and shape their own lives in defiance of official regulations – is huge.

Young people watch bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood films, write blogs about their social lives and pass phone numbers through car windows during interminable traffic jams. In the wealthy suburbs of northern Tehran, women go out wearing long coats over mini-skirts and low-cut tops as they make their way to the wild parties that take place almost every night.

Mona Zandi Haghighi is a 35-year-old film director whose first film, On a Friday Afternoon, has won prizes in Germany, France, Greece and the US, as well as in Iran’s Fajr film festival. Of the recent clampdown, she says: “It is like we have returned to the period before Khatami but the difference is that people started to become more relaxed – and they won’t be able to silence them anymore.”

She’s a confident, cosmopolitan woman with short dark hair and large silver earrings, and lives a privileged existence in northern Tehran, making films in her stylish modern office during the week, and doing pilates and going to parties at the weekend. “Now people complain more, they resist more. I think the nature of our society is such that it’s very unpredictable – you can never tell what is going to happen next.”

Even forward-thinking Iranian women like Haghighi don’t disapprove of everything President Ahmadi-Nejad has done. “Some things – such as the economy and living conditions – have become worse,” she says, “and the crackdown on arts, books and films, all happened when Ahmadi-Nejad came to office. But I think some parts of it are not bad. Only someone like Ahmadi-Nejad could stand up to George Bush.”

But Azar Nafisi, the author, is optimistic – like most of the women I speak to in Iran. “Living in Iran is like the month of April – there are always periods of sunshine followed by showers,” she says. “You get through the periods of repression and closing and crackdowns. But because society is still advancing, it won’t hold: things will always be opening up again.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The age of seance

The age of seance

By James Lovegrove

Published: March 8 2008 00:22 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:22

Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind
By Antonio Melechi
William Heinemann £20, 276 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death
By Deborah Blum
Arrow £8.99, 370 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
By Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 527 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Conversations with Eternity
By Victor Hugo, translated and with a commentary by John Chambers
New Paradigm $13.95, 260 pages

In 1848, a series of mysterious knocks and bangs began resounding through the timber walls and floors of a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The two daughters of the Fox family who owned the reputedly haunted house began addressing the unseen source of the noise. The girls identified it as the spirit of a dead man and gave him the somewhat unnerving name Mr Splitfoot. Through a simple code – two knocks for yes, silence for no – they were able to engage in conversation with him. Word soon spread. People came from far and wide to talk to Mr Splitfoot and pose questions about the afterlife. They inquired about loved ones who were dead. His replies convinced. The spiritualist movement had begun.

A fascination with communicating with the dead continues to grip us today. Television shows such as Most Haunted and Crossing Over With John Edward, both hosted by mediums, get good ratings. Stage mediums remain a box-office draw in provincial theatres. Ours is an age that is pleased with its own rationality, yet we have retained an appetite for messages from the great beyond.

Two recently published books cast an eye over the early years of spiritualism and explore how the phenomenon was regarded in its infancy. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural and Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters both show how Victorian intellectuals were at pains to consider spiritualism from a scientific standpoint and use it to form a bridge between fact and religious faith.

Melechi is a visiting fellow at the University of York whose previous book, Fugitive Minds, explored mental disturbances such as deja-vu and sleep paralysis. Servants of the Supernatural delves into what its author winningly calls “the golden age of the Victorian seance”. The opening sections of the book are concerned with mesmerism (a forerunner of modern-day hypnotherapy), which in the first half of the 19th century evolved into a powerful medical tool that could help the mind restore itself to health. It could even be harnessed in surgery. Operations were carried out successfully on patients under “mesmeric sleep”, a far better method of anaesthetisation than ether. For the public, however, mesmerism was best known in its bastardised form, stage hypnotism, and its association with low entertainment meant the high-minded medical establishment would not take it seriously.

The controversy over mesmerism set the pattern for the problems that attended spiritualism. During the latter half of the century, table-turning, inspired by the Fox sisters, became a widespread parlour fad. Sitters would gather around a small tripod table and hold it down with their fingers while invoking the spirits of the dead. One leg of a small tripod table would rap against a larger table below, counting through the letters of the alphabet to form words.

“Mediums” soon emerged. These were people who were especially “sensitive” to the presence of the spirits and who found that they could charge money for their services. They devised a less labour-intensive method of communing with the other side, by going into a trance and speaking in the voices of the dead. The pronouncements they relayed were cryptic and often bizarre, but usually carried a reassuring message to the living. To enhance the effect, mediums would manifest a whole array of remarkable physical phenomena: glowing hands that danced in the air, extrusions of ectoplasm from various orifices, musical instruments played by unseen beings, and so on.

Investigation by scientists, among them Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, failed to prove conclusively whether any of these miraculous feats were genuine. While some clergymen condemned spiritualism as heretical, there was a general feeling that it was a harmless pastime for the middle and lower classes. Establishment figures were welcome to treat it with a level of seriousness, but they risked their reputations if they dared to give it full credence. This was the fate of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who would not admit that some mediums were flagrant fakers, even when they were taken to court and exposed as such.

Servants of the Supernatural picks its way through the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era carefully and with an understated wit. If there’s a flaw, it’s that Melechi’s tone is austere, at times sober verging on the teetotal. That isn’t a criticism that can be levelled at Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, which brings a zesty transatlantic flavour to the material.

Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin who has won a Pulitzer for her writings on primate research, chooses as her chief focus William James, older brother of Henry the novelist. The senior James sibling, though American-born, was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the UK, and later its president, and as a psychologist spent much of his life applying empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism.

If a doubter at first, James became a convert to spiritualism after the death of his infant son Herman. The prospect that the dead did live on came in the form of Leonora Piper, whom James reckoned to be the one genuine medium in a field littered with impostors. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove a single crow to be white.”

Piper was his white crow. Years of repeated and intensive testing by the SPR and its American offshoot failed to find fault with her talents. Even when being subjected to all manner of undignified probings and jabbings while in her trance, this Bostonian shopkeeper’s wife was calmly able to furnish information she could not have come by through normal means, facts known only to the investigators or the impartial witnesses they brought with them. For example, Frederick Myers, a founder of the SPR, was utterly convinced that Piper had been in contact with the love of his life, Annie Marshall, who had committed suicide. As Myers put it in a letter to a fellow SPR member, Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given but facts unknown to Mrs P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which … left little doubt – no doubt – that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

The portly figure of Arthur Conan Doyle makes brief cameos in both Blum and Melechi’s books. It’s hard to discuss Victorian spiritualism without mentioning the creator of Sherlock Holmes, since he was one of the movement’s most ardent believers and staunchest advocates.

Andrew Lycett’s new biography, Conan Doyle, isn’t solely concerned with showing how the man who dreamed up the most rational character in all literature was himself fascinated by supernatural phenomena. However, it is a major strand running through the book. Lycett, who has penned the lives of other eminent literary figures including Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, depicts a man committed, from a young age, to the pursuit of reason and materialism while “maintaining an essential belief in a higher being”. Conan Doyle’s great hope was to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of the two.

It was while establishing himself as a GP in Southsea, before his literary career took flight, that Conan Doyle first began attending seances. Not until much later, though, did he openly declare his belief that spiritualism was genuine, and that came after his son Kingsley died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. As with William James and Frederick Myers, the unbearable sense of loss caused Conan Doyle to lower his scepticism threshold. He began regularly receiving communications from Kingsley – most of which may be characterised as “You were right all along, Dad, there is life after death.” He found himself able to pardon even the crudest physical effects on the grounds that what they represented was more important than what they were: “The levitation of a tambourine or the moving of furniture may seem humble and even ludicrous … the real question has to do with the force that moves it.”

Conan Doyle ploughed a great deal of his wealth into supporting low-circulation spiritualist periodicals and establishing his Psychic Bookshop and Museum on Victoria Street. With his unswerving and unquestioning acceptance of all things spiritualist, not to mention his belief in the existence of fairies, he squandered his fame too, losing the approval of a public that adored his detective stories. One of the great ironies of Conan Doyle’s life, as Lycett’s compendious, meticulously detailed tome makes clear, is that the world wanted him to be Holmes. He, on the other hand, wanted to be anything but.

Another great Victorian-epoch writer was less public in his espousal of spiritualism but no less fervent. Conversations With Eternity is a distillation of transcripts of table-turning sessions carried out by Victor Hugo and family while in exile on Jersey. The notes were lost in various archives until 1923, when they were collated and published in French. This is their first publication in English.

The Hugos fled the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III in 1851, and having arrived in Jersey, set about holding seances. It seems likely that Hugo’s interest in this activity was precipitated by the death, nine years earlier, of his daughter Leopoldine. Equally, boredom may have played a part. For two years the family were in nightly contact with the ethereal realm, and Conversations With Eternity details the results of their sessions.

Anyone wishing to see the problems that researchers such as William James were up against need look no further than this book. Various spirits, including the shades of such luminaries as Hannibal and Shakespeare, visited the Hugos to convey statements of either mind-numbing banality or bewildering obscurity, sometimes both at once. The one, just-about-coherent theme that emerges from this book is the notion of the world as a prison for human souls, who become reincarnated as lesser organisms if their owners were insufficiently well-behaved during their lives. This leads to a lot of high-flown, repetitious gobbledygook and amusing assertions such as: “The plant is the grimmest of the soul’s prisons. The lily is sheer hell.”

What Conversations With Eternity does well, with its Channel Island channellings, is reinforce the frustrating truth about seances and mediumship. Believers will find much to convince them in the evidence it presents. Unbelievers will not.

Nowadays spiritualism has become part of the paranormal subculture. It and all its New Age-y and Fortean ilk are tolerated but not subjected to any great level of scrutiny. Perhaps that is because, despite our rationalist era, many of us remain in thrall to the hope that deceased loved ones are waiting for us in the next world. We find it hard to accept that life reaches a full stop; we feel there must be, at the very least, a coda, if not a whole new open-ended sentence …

James Lovegrove’s forthcoming book is ‘The Wingless Boy’ (Gollancz)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

By James Lovegrove

Published: March 8 2008 00:22 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:22

Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind
By Antonio Melechi
William Heinemann £20, 276 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death
By Deborah Blum
Arrow £8.99, 370 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
By Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 527 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Conversations with Eternity
By Victor Hugo, translated and with a commentary by John Chambers
New Paradigm $13.95, 260 pages

In 1848, a series of mysterious knocks and bangs began resounding through the timber walls and floors of a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The two daughters of the Fox family who owned the reputedly haunted house began addressing the unseen source of the noise. The girls identified it as the spirit of a dead man and gave him the somewhat unnerving name Mr Splitfoot. Through a simple code – two knocks for yes, silence for no – they were able to engage in conversation with him. Word soon spread. People came from far and wide to talk to Mr Splitfoot and pose questions about the afterlife. They inquired about loved ones who were dead. His replies convinced. The spiritualist movement had begun.

A fascination with communicating with the dead continues to grip us today. Television shows such as Most Haunted and Crossing Over With John Edward, both hosted by mediums, get good ratings. Stage mediums remain a box-office draw in provincial theatres. Ours is an age that is pleased with its own rationality, yet we have retained an appetite for messages from the great beyond.

Two recently published books cast an eye over the early years of spiritualism and explore how the phenomenon was regarded in its infancy. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural and Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters both show how Victorian intellectuals were at pains to consider spiritualism from a scientific standpoint and use it to form a bridge between fact and religious faith.

Melechi is a visiting fellow at the University of York whose previous book, Fugitive Minds, explored mental disturbances such as deja-vu and sleep paralysis. Servants of the Supernatural delves into what its author winningly calls “the golden age of the Victorian seance”. The opening sections of the book are concerned with mesmerism (a forerunner of modern-day hypnotherapy), which in the first half of the 19th century evolved into a powerful medical tool that could help the mind restore itself to health. It could even be harnessed in surgery. Operations were carried out successfully on patients under “mesmeric sleep”, a far better method of anaesthetisation than ether. For the public, however, mesmerism was best known in its bastardised form, stage hypnotism, and its association with low entertainment meant the high-minded medical establishment would not take it seriously.

The controversy over mesmerism set the pattern for the problems that attended spiritualism. During the latter half of the century, table-turning, inspired by the Fox sisters, became a widespread parlour fad. Sitters would gather around a small tripod table and hold it down with their fingers while invoking the spirits of the dead. One leg of a small tripod table would rap against a larger table below, counting through the letters of the alphabet to form words.

“Mediums” soon emerged. These were people who were especially “sensitive” to the presence of the spirits and who found that they could charge money for their services. They devised a less labour-intensive method of communing with the other side, by going into a trance and speaking in the voices of the dead. The pronouncements they relayed were cryptic and often bizarre, but usually carried a reassuring message to the living. To enhance the effect, mediums would manifest a whole array of remarkable physical phenomena: glowing hands that danced in the air, extrusions of ectoplasm from various orifices, musical instruments played by unseen beings, and so on.

Investigation by scientists, among them Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, failed to prove conclusively whether any of these miraculous feats were genuine. While some clergymen condemned spiritualism as heretical, there was a general feeling that it was a harmless pastime for the middle and lower classes. Establishment figures were welcome to treat it with a level of seriousness, but they risked their reputations if they dared to give it full credence. This was the fate of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who would not admit that some mediums were flagrant fakers, even when they were taken to court and exposed as such.

Servants of the Supernatural picks its way through the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era carefully and with an understated wit. If there’s a flaw, it’s that Melechi’s tone is austere, at times sober verging on the teetotal. That isn’t a criticism that can be levelled at Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, which brings a zesty transatlantic flavour to the material.

Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin who has won a Pulitzer for her writings on primate research, chooses as her chief focus William James, older brother of Henry the novelist. The senior James sibling, though American-born, was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the UK, and later its president, and as a psychologist spent much of his life applying empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism.

If a doubter at first, James became a convert to spiritualism after the death of his infant son Herman. The prospect that the dead did live on came in the form of Leonora Piper, whom James reckoned to be the one genuine medium in a field littered with impostors. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove a single crow to be white.”

Piper was his white crow. Years of repeated and intensive testing by the SPR and its American offshoot failed to find fault with her talents. Even when being subjected to all manner of undignified probings and jabbings while in her trance, this Bostonian shopkeeper’s wife was calmly able to furnish information she could not have come by through normal means, facts known only to the investigators or the impartial witnesses they brought with them. For example, Frederick Myers, a founder of the SPR, was utterly convinced that Piper had been in contact with the love of his life, Annie Marshall, who had committed suicide. As Myers put it in a letter to a fellow SPR member, Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given but facts unknown to Mrs P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which … left little doubt – no doubt – that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

The portly figure of Arthur Conan Doyle makes brief cameos in both Blum and Melechi’s books. It’s hard to discuss Victorian spiritualism without mentioning the creator of Sherlock Holmes, since he was one of the movement’s most ardent believers and staunchest advocates.

Andrew Lycett’s new biography, Conan Doyle, isn’t solely concerned with showing how the man who dreamed up the most rational character in all literature was himself fascinated by supernatural phenomena. However, it is a major strand running through the book. Lycett, who has penned the lives of other eminent literary figures including Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, depicts a man committed, from a young age, to the pursuit of reason and materialism while “maintaining an essential belief in a higher being”. Conan Doyle’s great hope was to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of the two.

It was while establishing himself as a GP in Southsea, before his literary career took flight, that Conan Doyle first began attending seances. Not until much later, though, did he openly declare his belief that spiritualism was genuine, and that came after his son Kingsley died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. As with William James and Frederick Myers, the unbearable sense of loss caused Conan Doyle to lower his scepticism threshold. He began regularly receiving communications from Kingsley – most of which may be characterised as “You were right all along, Dad, there is life after death.” He found himself able to pardon even the crudest physical effects on the grounds that what they represented was more important than what they were: “The levitation of a tambourine or the moving of furniture may seem humble and even ludicrous … the real question has to do with the force that moves it.”

Conan Doyle ploughed a great deal of his wealth into supporting low-circulation spiritualist periodicals and establishing his Psychic Bookshop and Museum on Victoria Street. With his unswerving and unquestioning acceptance of all things spiritualist, not to mention his belief in the existence of fairies, he squandered his fame too, losing the approval of a public that adored his detective stories. One of the great ironies of Conan Doyle’s life, as Lycett’s compendious, meticulously detailed tome makes clear, is that the world wanted him to be Holmes. He, on the other hand, wanted to be anything but.

Another great Victorian-epoch writer was less public in his espousal of spiritualism but no less fervent. Conversations With Eternity is a distillation of transcripts of table-turning sessions carried out by Victor Hugo and family while in exile on Jersey. The notes were lost in various archives until 1923, when they were collated and published in French. This is their first publication in English.

The Hugos fled the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III in 1851, and having arrived in Jersey, set about holding seances. It seems likely that Hugo’s interest in this activity was precipitated by the death, nine years earlier, of his daughter Leopoldine. Equally, boredom may have played a part. For two years the family were in nightly contact with the ethereal realm, and Conversations With Eternity details the results of their sessions.

Anyone wishing to see the problems that researchers such as William James were up against need look no further than this book. Various spirits, including the shades of such luminaries as Hannibal and Shakespeare, visited the Hugos to convey statements of either mind-numbing banality or bewildering obscurity, sometimes both at once. The one, just-about-coherent theme that emerges from this book is the notion of the world as a prison for human souls, who become reincarnated as lesser organisms if their owners were insufficiently well-behaved during their lives. This leads to a lot of high-flown, repetitious gobbledygook and amusing assertions such as: “The plant is the grimmest of the soul’s prisons. The lily is sheer hell.”

What Conversations With Eternity does well, with its Channel Island channellings, is reinforce the frustrating truth about seances and mediumship. Believers will find much to convince them in the evidence it presents. Unbelievers will not.

Nowadays spiritualism has become part of the paranormal subculture. It and all its New Age-y and Fortean ilk are tolerated but not subjected to any great level of scrutiny. Perhaps that is because, despite our rationalist era, many of us remain in thrall to the hope that deceased loved ones are waiting for us in the next world. We find it hard to accept that life reaches a full stop; we feel there must be, at the very least, a coda, if not a whole new open-ended sentence …

James Lovegrove’s forthcoming book is ‘The Wingless Boy’ (Gollancz)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

NY Times: Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

===

Op-Ed Contributor

Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

•    

                                                              E

 

By NEIL SHUBIN

Published: February 24, 2008

 

Chicago

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Katherine Streeter

 

     

DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.

Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.

But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.

Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.

The shark example is particularly striking because sharks are very primitive living fish, having shared a common ancestor with us over 400 million years ago. Biological cloning is not a recent invention of scientists; it is an ancient ability. And sharks, fish and lizards are probably only the tip of the iceberg. We know of virgin birth only in those rare instances when we’ve been lucky enough to see it. Nobody knows how common it is because there has been no systematic search for the phenomenon.

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”

==

FT: Of ordinariness and occupation

Of ordinariness and occupation

By Sharmila Devi

Published: January 12 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 12 2008 02:00

Afirst journey into Ramallah can induce a mild adrenalin rush for those unused to Israeli soldiers, guns and checkpoints. But, once in the outskirts of this West Bank city, the fervour of security gives way to an almost rural calm.

Although some of the white- and-pink limestone buildings bear the pockmarks of gun battles, it is the winding and hilly streets, where children play in spotless school uniforms, that force vehicles to slow down and their passengers to take in their surroundings.

Ramallah has no architectural glories or historic landmarks to draw visitors. Its attraction lies in the very ordinariness of everyday life in the midst of conflict and occupation. The local policeman waves you across potholed roads with a bemused smile. Just around a corner, a gap between buildings offers an angled view of the stony, biblical hills surrounding the city.

Mosques and women in headscarves are prevalent. But Ramallah is also home to Quaker schools, yuppie gyms, restaurants, bars and galleries that provide a haven from the almost constant political conflict.

Palestinians are used to foreigners and meet many journalists, aid workers, diplomats and peacenik Israelis. Intense debates of historical grievances are usually accompanied by Arab hospitality of food, drink and jokes.

Ramallah has been transformed over the past 60 years. In the early 20th century it was a provincial, predominantly Christian town dotted with villas for rich Palestinians escaping the summer heat of coastal Jaffa.

But the town was forced to absorb massive influxes of Palestinian refugees after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and its Six-Day War against Egpyt, Syria and Jordan in 1967.

Unlike the historic West Bank cities of Nablus, Hebron and, of course, Jerusalem, Ramallah's relative modernity has better enabled it to cope with transformation.

Its present incarnation started with the Oslo accords of 1993, which gave the Palestinians limited self-rule but also intensified Israel's separation of the West Bank and Ramallah from Jerusalem, which is less than 10 miles away.

Palestinians yearn for Jerusalem but most cannot go there because Israeli checkpoints prevent them from moving freely around the West Bank. Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state remains a distant dream and Ramallah has become the de facto , if reluctant, Palestinian capital for politics, business and culture. In the restaurants and bars of this enclosed world, smart-suited officials from the Palestinian Authority's government offices and ministries rub shoulders with budding filmmakers.

US and European governments warn their citizens against visiting. But foreigners can move more easily than Palestinians between the disparate worlds of Israel and the occupied territories. Convoys of diplomats swishing through town are a common sight. All other foreigners will either need their own car or a friendly taxi driver to navigate the numerous checkpoints to enter the city through Israel's West Bank separation barrier, which around Ramallah is mostly an eight-metre-high concrete wall.

Overseas friends who visited me always wanted to see the late Yassir Arafat's offices because of the iconic images of his Mukata , or headquarters, being shelled and besieged by the Israeli army. Arafat died in 2004 and the Mukata now contains his tomb.

The guards at the Mukata 's gates look fierce but a polite request will win a smile and entry to the tomb in the large courtyard.

Near the Mukata is a fast-food landmark. Falafel Abu Loay has been run by the eponymous owner since he left the northern city of Jenin after an Israeli army incursion in 2002. Abu Loay is deaf but his loyal customers will park on the kerb near his stall and hold up the appropriate number of digits to signal how many orders they want.

Ramallah's restaurants and bars are always packed, even though they are too expensive for many Palestinians. Conversation with strangers is easy, usually over a selection of mezz e or salads and nargileh, or bubbly water-pipe.

There is the Upside Down Café where a tableau of chairs and tables glued to the ceiling serves as decoration. Palestinian journalists like to gather here and their ranks swelled with a small exodus of Palestinians who fled the Gaza Strip after Hamas took over last June. Darna's restaurant is for the elite. Palestinian negotiators will huddle with diplomats next to tables of ladies who lunch. Pronto's around the corner is much more informal, for aid workers and Palestinian artists.

In the summer, drinkers and diners will spill over to pavement tables, undeterred by the growing Islamisation of Palestinian society. If there is tension, provoked by either an Israeli army raid or by militant youths known as the shebab , public places quickly empty.

Film festivals, art exhibitions, dance and theatre are all booming in Ramallah, promoted with the help of foreign donors and the Palestinian diaspora dispersed around the rest of the world. Such activities are vital for a population who are increasingly imprisoned in their city. At a recent book reading, I chatted with a local human rights lawyer now author, Rajah Shehadeh, who spoke about his love for the nearby hills.

He wrote in his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape how the surrounding terrain had shrunk because of Israeli settlements: "Perhaps the curse of Palestine is its centrality to the west's historical and biblical imagination. The landscape is thus cut to match the grim events recorded there."

Sharmila Devi is the FT's former Jerusalem correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Onward Muslim soldiers

Onward Muslim soldiers

By Stephen Fidler

Published: September 1 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 1 2007 03:00

The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In by Hugh Kennedy Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, 448 pages FT bookshop price: £20

Last September, Pope Benedict XVI ignited furore across the Islamic world when he repeated a statement made by a Byzantine emperor in the 14th century: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Only after the controversy was under way did the Pope make clear that he disagreed with the assertion. He had, however, pointed out in his speech that the Koran contained contrasting views on the question of whether unbelievers should be compelled to convert to Islam or whether, as one verse says: "There is no compulsion in religion."

Early versions of the Koran included moderate verses, which urged conversion by discussion. The dominant opinion among scholars, as Hugh Kennedy notes, is that only later were verses incorporated that urged unrestricted warfare on unbelievers. The implication is that these more peaceful verses emerged at a time when Mohammed's own position was insecure. The more strident passages date to when he was leader of a successful military force.

Mohammed's military campaigns ensured from the outset that armed force would be an acceptable way to defend the new religion and, later, to expand it. They blocked any tendency towards the pacifism that had marked early Christianity. They also provided a model for the Arab conquests which followed his death and took Islam as far as both China's borders and France within 100 years.

The story of this extraordinary expansion is well told in this excellent book. Not least, the account helps explain many of the current borders of the Muslim world. It also provides the early context for religious ideas that continue to motivate believers. Of these, the most controversial is that of jihad. From the outset there were differences about what it means - whether it has to be violent or can be spiritual, whether it is obligatory or voluntary and whether it is merely defensive or can be expansionary. This debate still reverberates today.

In fact, Mohammed's own success was not based simply on military victories. Kennedy, professor of history at the University of St Andrew, points out that diplomacy was more important in securing the allegiance of people in Yemen and Oman. Yet, when Mohammed died in 632, the future of Islam was in the balance.

According to Kennedy, the proponents of the new religion were forced to look outward from the Arabian peninsula. Muslims were forbidden from attacking each other. But the Bedouin way of life had been based on frequent raids of neighbouring tribes. The choice was either to expand beyond Arabia or see Arabs fall back to their pre-Islamic tribal rivalries.

The key to their extraordinary success lay neither in technological superiority nor in innovative tactics. It was due to events elsewhere in the first three decades of the seventh century. The two great imperial powers of the day - the Persian and Byzantine empires - had exhausted each other in military campaigns that saw early Persian successes reversed by later Byzantine victories. If the Arab military effort had begun three decades earlier, it surely would have failed. Yet the deal the Arabs offered their adversaries - surrender, pay us tribute and we'll allow life to continue much as before - meant they conquered swathes of territory without a fight.

The sources for any work on this subject are often sketchy and contradictory. Kennedy frequently has to rely on accounts made even centuries after the events they describe. When sources are more contemporary, they are regularly concerned with tales of how the booty was shared afterwards, not with the facts of battle. As such, Kennedy makes plain that his descriptions are often no more than a best guess. But it is an approach that provides the reader with a well-paced narrative that does not compromise on academic rigour.

Most of the focus of the book is on the expanding edge of the empire. What is not made clear is how that expansion related to events at the centre. In particular, the rivalries that led to the great divide between the Sunni and Shia are only touched upon. The lack of information on these power struggles leaves the reader wondering how, if at all, they shaped the conquests.

This is, nonetheless, a highly-readable account of remote events that still have a striking relevance for the shape of our modern world.

Stephen Fidler is the FT's defence and security editor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: The other side of the equation

He found hints of those universal truths in his violin playing, especially Beethoven. But most of all he found hints, a great satisfying assurance, in his personal sort of religion. He did not believe in God per se, but felt there had to be some kind of harmonising principle behind the patterns of the cosmos. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

==

The other side of the equation

Review By David Bodanis

Published: August 4 2007 01:13 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:13

Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster £25, 675 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

The popular Einstein story is impossible to resist. A young man fails his mathematics exams yet becomes the world’s greatest scientist. He works in obscurity. When he publishes his great papers, he’s ignored. Despite all this – and his autism – he triumphs. But he does so only with the help of his wife, a key source of his ideas.

It turns out that none of that is true. The reality, however, is even better. American biographer Walter Isaacson is a bit too respectful of his material. He writes in a polite, almost awe-struck tone and goes on for so many hundreds of pages that the reader begs for a bit more selection. But his new book is still fun to read.

Einstein was actually an excellent maths student, mastering calculus by 15. His father and uncle nurtured his curiosity. Once, when Einstein was ill as a child, his father bought him a compass. How, possibly, did its needle move? Something hidden was behind things, but neither of them could work out what.

Coming from a family of such inquiring minds meant that Prussian-style schooling was impossible to take. Einstein hated most of his teachers in Germany for their discipline and teaching by rote. His resistance to authority was a problem at university. His main physics professor taught dully and Einstein didn’t hide his dissatisfaction. Although he graduated well, the professor refused to write recommendations for academic jobs.

Einstein ended up in a patent office in Bern. But even that wasn’t as isolated as has often been portrayed. He assessed electrical machinery – as hi-tech then as the evaluation of Silicon Valley start-ups today. As for his supposed autism, he excelled at making friends. He put people at ease with jokes and stories. He’d even nabbed his university’s one female physics student as a wife.

There was severance from all his friends and colleagues in 1905, however, when he put his ideas together in a flurry of papers. One culminated with his equation E=mc2. It asserted that two realms that everyone had thought of as separate – mass and energy – were actually one and the same. Mass, he proposed, could be turned into energy. He even suggested that radioactive metals might one day have their inner power unleashed this way.

His wife was a good physics student, but didn’t come up with the idea. The suggestion that she did seems to have come from Serb nationalists in the 1960s (she was originally Serbian).

Within months, his papers were recognised by leading physicists. A few years later he had left the patent office far behind. In time his own creativity faded and he ended up repeating the same approaches. But in his years of success he got closer than anyone to discovering the universe’s deep truths.

He found hints of those universal truths in his violin playing, especially Beethoven. But most of all he found hints, a great satisfying assurance, in his personal sort of religion. He did not believe in God per se, but felt there had to be some kind of harmonising principle behind the patterns of the cosmos. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

David Bodanis is the author of ‘E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation’ (Macmillan)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Refuge from the haste of the world

Refuge from the haste of the world

By llija Trojanow

Published: May 5 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 5 2007 03:00

Many buildings are overwhelming to the eye, yet very few overwhelm the mind. The Haram al-Sharif, the Grand Mosque at Mecca, with its numerous entrances and pillars, curves and alignments, corners and niches, all 130,000 sq metres of it, is not only unfathomably large, but the ever-changing perspectives revealed to the pilgrim upon each visit also proclaim the immeasurability of God. The choreography of the rituals infuses the grey and white and green, and reaches up to the seven minarets and the seven domes. If architecture is substance filled with life, then the Haram is surely one of mankind's most beautiful buildings.

The passageways, the arches, the domes and the galleries are indeed imposing, but without the Kaaba, impressive despite the simplicity of its architecture, they would be without effect. The golden embroidery on the black material seems almost too ornamental, a distraction from the purity of the simple, cubically conceived idea. The symbol is constantly affirmed by the pilgrims who night and day circle this sun like planets.

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There were still several days until the Haj proper, the exodus into the desert, the time of purification, sacrifice and stoning - several free days to spend as we chose during which I, like many others, spent as many hours as possible in the Haram al-Sharif. Sometimes my neighbours were Iranian women, once an Algerian foreman, another time a Senegalese student who was studying in France, and once a local committee from Indonesia. The mosque was filled up already in the early morning, a little later every square metre was taken, mostly by groups who would take over an area and spend the entire day there. The place felt like a refuge from the haste of the world, from one's own restlessness. The stillness was a miracle; a calm sea not rippled by tides. A single Saudi bus driver would create more noise than the gentle murmuring and padding of bare feet in the elliptical refuge.

The meditation of the other pilgrims was infectious. I, too, felt the need to lose myself but didn't know what to lose myself in. I couldn't recite the Koran in Arabic. I would read a sura or some ayaat in translation and begin to ponder the content and meaning until I realised that I had become distracted again by the tranquillity. I tried to pray but my prayers dried up after I had fulfilled all my promises and thought of my nearest and dearest. Praying for the peace of the world didn't seem plausible and to pray for myself - well, it was good to discover there wasn't so much I desired. So I prayed with my eyes, looked down from the oval, open terrace of the Haram al-Sharif to the Kaaba below. The people rotated at a steady pace, as though on the turning wheel of God. I watched this perpetuum mobile of devotion for hours on end; and day turned to dusk.

On the terrace, too, people circle the Kaaba, those who haven't found space below, or those in search of a change. For a little extra room they accept the greater distance. We step among the minarets, unrushed, caressed occasionally by the feathery touch of the wind. My gaze is directed downwards and I repeat "Allahu Akhbar" without cease - no trace of footsteps are left on the light marble, every step a transient step, only the name of God remains, unchanged, unchangeable.

The Grand Mosque is surrounded by palaces, hotels and blocks of flats, plain buildings for the most part that have firmly cemented the western style in Mecca. Both in their appearance and their practicality, they are inferior to the old Saudi houses. Once upon a time, the typically high buildings were constructed in such a way that they trapped the breeze in the upper floors, and the open, jutting-out Venetian windows filtered out the sun and allowed the air to circulate through the rooms. But air conditioning put an end to this tradition. Two wings of a building rise higher and higher, connected by a shopping centre several storeys high, where the wealthier pilgrims retire to imbibe the worldwide taste of Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Hut.

Designed like an American shopping mall, this centre offers everything a pilgrim could possibly need (food, drink, CDs of the complete Koran), and many more items he might crave in his life outside of the pilgrimage. At one of the side entrances, fully automated massage chairs offer five-minute respites from the rigours of prayer. There is no lack of modernity in the packed halls - McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wimpy are as established in Mecca as Gucci and Cardin, Longines and Swatch.

It is the sheer number of pilgrims that lends the sterile shopping mall a bazaar-like atmosphere. They transform the carefully decorated, air-conditioned arcades into picnic spots. They spread their rugs in the corridors and eat their pizza, chicken or falafel in front of glass facades boasting credit card signs. The boutiques behind them offer the finest fabrics and the most elegant shoes. When it comes to consumption, certainly all prejudices and antagonisms are laid aside (if Coca-Cola has a bad reputation, Pepsi steps in); asceticism is only practised on certain occasions. Yet while the superiority of western wares may be widely accepted, this certainly doesn't equate to an acceptance of a western lifestyle and living by secular values.

Whenever I felt a painful dig in my back I knew that Nigeria was behind me. "Take it easy, man," I said to the giant from Kano whose upper body was scarcely covered by the 2m long ihram cloth. "Many, many people," he grumbled in annoyance.

"If you go slow, there will be no 'go slow,' " I said, punning on the Nigerian name for a traffic jam, whereupon the giant guffawed with laughter before giving me another shove that sent me flying into an Arab lady who, from within the depths of her burka, shouted "Shwey, shwey," another expression for the commandment relevant at this time: go with care.

It was fascinating to watch the different behaviour of various pilgrims in Mecca. There was such variety that you might have supposed these people had nothing in common other than the two pieces of white cloth they wore. Even the way they wore these differentiated them from one another. The black Africans managed to look relaxed even in the ihram, thanks to their athletic build, their way of walking, coupled with the fact that they used the upper cloth as a scarf sometimes, draping it around their necks with an almost dandy air. The Afghans benefited from laying aside their intimidating robes - now their regular features and bright eyes were shown to advantage. The moment they pulled on their local garments, their proud bearing returned, they stood up taller, feet wide apart, two heads higher thanks to their turbans. They kissed and embraced one another in elaborate rituals - the expression of a connection that went beyond Islam.

In absolute contrast to the Afghans were the Indonesians, the largest Muslim population in the world, and perhaps the friendliest, judging by their openness on the Haj. Whether from Java or Sumatra, the Indonesians were reserved, gentle and discreet. They acted in as exemplary a manner as the Prophet could have wished.

Of the many brief encounters on my Haj, the one that made the deepest impression happened on the first Friday prayer. Standing to my right was an elderly man with a bushy moustache who was carrying a travel bag with the word "Iraq" on it. There was nothing about him to suggest that he had enjoyed any privileges in life. His face spoke of life's tough experiences - his hands and feet were rough. He was wearing plain trousers and the material of his shirt was far too thick for the heat. We greeted one another, then turned to our prayers. He devoured every word of the two richly formulated sermons that trickled through the loudspeakers on to us like honey. When we had whispered, "Assalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuhu" over our shoulders, right and left, I saw he was weeping. We embraced, as is customary in many countries after the Friday prayer, and looked at one another. I tried to smile. He turned away, my right shoulder was damp, and the greeting of peace held no promise - a few weeks later the first bombs fell on his country.

This is an edited extract from 'Mumbai to Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Holy Sites of Islam' by Ilija Trojanow, published by Haus Publishing. Trojanow is also the author of 'Along the Ganges'

The Haj

By Justin Marozzi

Published: May 5 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 5 2007 03:00

I have to confess to a massive bias in recommending Burton's classic account of his 1853 journey to Mecca. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, to give him his full name, is by some margin my favourite explorer, a huge character from a century that spawned industrial quantities of them. What makes him so irresistible? Probably the remarkable combination in one man of erudition and bluff humour, martial bravery, insatiable intellectual and sexual curiosity, a facility for foreign languages (29, according to one account), a virtually unparalleled appetite for disguise and adventure, all this capped with a writing style in prose and poetry that makes him the 19th century's literary explorer sans pareil. He was naughtier than Doughty, less fey than Lawrence (not difficult), more fun than Livingstone. He wasn't a bad fencer, either.

Sneaking off to the sacrosanct shrine of Islam dressed as a wandering Persian dervish was about as naughty as it got. Had he been rumbled - and he came perilously close on a number of nail-shredding occasions - there can be little doubt he would have lost his head.

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Adventures, mishaps galore, moments of trembling unease and side-splitting humour abound in his magisterial story of penetrating

Mecca.

Burton's mastery of the Koran, of religious discussion and the intricate court rituals of the east, which were essential to preserve his disguise and his life, underline the dazzling breadth of his talents as an explorer. How ruthlessly they contrast today with today's breed of intellectual lightweights.

My two-volume edition from Dover might be a little heavy - figuratively and literally - for some tastes, in which case the best (cheating) bet is undoubtedly an extract in the new edition from Penguin's excellent Great Journeys series, To the Holy Shrines.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

 

FT: Thirst for freedom

A well-run machine of lawyers, publicists, statisticians and rebuttal experts then kept everyone in line. The other piece of cunning was to ground their cause in distrust of minorities and immigrants.

In this colourful book, two truths emerge: you can take a person to water, but don’t expect them to drink it; and single-issue politics is rarely that at all.

==

Thirst for freedom

By Toby Moore

Published: April 27 2007 15:51 | Last updated: April 27 2007 15:51

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City
by Michael A. Lerner
Harvard University Press ₤18.95, 360 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤15.16

Nothing fits more awkwardly into the history of the United States than Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 when the sale of alcohol was banned. The ban was upheld throughout the otherwise exuberant Roaring Twenties - a period of sexual liberation and flowering social freedoms represented by the Jazz Age. H