In Which I Straddle Two Stories
One of the unexpected benefits of writings more than one thing at a time, set in different times and/or places, is that you stumble across the places where the stories hook up. It always gives me a zing of pleasure to see the relationship between the Crusades and Henry the so-called Navigators’s explorations. Or to realize that Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) were near contemporaries.*
Right now I’m enjoying another type of synchronicity: I’m writing two different stories that touch on the issue of Dutch neutrality in the first world war from differing viewpoints. On the one hand, I’m writing about Queen Wilhemina, who was very proud of her role in maintaining Dutch neutrality throughout the war. At war’s end, she even gave sanctuary to the Kaiser and refused to extradite him to Britain as a war criminal.**
On the other hand, I’m writing about Dutch illustrator and cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, who believed strongly that neutrality was a serious mistake. His virulent anti-German (and perhaps more importantly, pro-Belgium) political cartoons reached an international audience.
As I write, both perspectives are understandable. Even laudable. It’s a conundrum. Or perhaps a lesson.
*Marx feels much later thanks to that additional twenty years–at least to my simple minded way of thinking.
**She had a very different opinion about the Nazis.
From the Archives: Who Made the Map of the Modern Middle East?
The simple answer is: Great Britain. You want the long version?
In The Makers of the Modern Middle East historians T.G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, and Robert McNamara tell the story of how today’s Middle East was created from the remains of the Ottoman Empire during the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War.
The Allies weren’t the only powers that had an interest in the future of the region. Prince Feisal, who led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire with British aid, hoped to build an Arab kingdom based on Syria and Palestine. Dr. Chaim Weizmann had laid the political groundwork for British support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, created the modern, secular Turkish republic in the teeth of Allied opposition.
Fraser and his co-authors weave the details of competing territorial claims, conflicting political agreements, ignored reports, and colorful characters into a narrative as intricate as an Oriental rug, with a warp of Allied imperial ambitions and a weft of the emerging claims of Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism and Zionism.
* * *
The bottom line? If you promise the same piece of land to France, the Zionists and an Arab king, someone’s going to be unhappy when the war is over
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
From the Archives: Alhazen–The First True Scientist?
Anyone who built a pinhole camera from a cereal box to watch the solar eclipse last week owes a debt to Islamic scholar Abu Ali al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1041), known in the West as Alhazen.
Alhazen began his career as just another Islamic polymath. He soon got himself in trouble with the ruler of Cairo by boasting that he could regulate the flow of the Nile with a series of dams and dikes. At first glance, it had looked like such a simple problem. But the more he studied it, the more impossible it seemed. Al-Hakim, known to his subjects as the Mad Caliph with good reason, was getting impatient. Alhazen only saw one way out: he pretended to be crazy. Safely confined as a madman until the caliph’s death ten years later, Alhazen continued to work.
Time and isolation? It was the perfect situation for a man with a book to write.
While confined in his home, Alhazen revolutionized the study of optics and laid the foundation for the scientific method. (Move over, Sir Isaac Newton.) Before Alhazen, vision and light were questions of philosophy. Alhazen considered vision and light in terms of mathematics, physics, physiology, and even psychology. In his Book of Optics, he discussed the nature of light and color. He accurately described the mechanism of sight and the anatomy of the eye. He was concerned with reflection and refraction. He experimented with mirrors and lenses. He discovered that rainbows are caused by refraction and calculated the height of earth’s atmosphere. In his spare time, he built the first camera obscura.
Modern physicist Jim al-Khalili, in his excellent The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727)., calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727). calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727).