In one of Bernard Lewis’s books on middle eastern history, he discusses “innovation”, and how any thing new or innovative is suspect, and anything, if ever accepted, is done so only after a long time and much angst. One recent innovation of the Muslim world that comes to my mind has been the suicide vest.

Yet, there are places like Dubai, which has cornered the world market on construction cranes (by a huge percentage)…Dubai has been referred to by Wretchard in one of his entries discussing risk taking; it sounds like a booming place…or, there’s the portrait of Osama bin Laden’s father from “The Looming Tower.” Here was a man described as illiterate but with two outstanding qualities, a capacity for figures and numbers, and a love of work, who became an extremely wealthy man, yet he would lay bricks alongside his laborers. When no one would take on the difficult task of connecting Meccca and Medina via a highway through mountains, he did; he took apart excavators and bulldozers, packed them up the mountains on animals, reassembled them, and made the road.

Dar-al Islam is in a state of crisis. In some twisted sense (sorry), attacks on the west like Sept 11 are collateral damage (I don’t mean to diminish those events or our response to them). In one sense, they don’t have anything to do with us (although fundamentally, in a profoundly existential sense, they have everything to do with us).

cheers
lensatic compass