Reviews and News:
Since 1997 “a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.” It’s a shame, argues Janet Malcolm.
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Hugh Walpole’s supernatural thrillers.
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John Simon reviews Julian Barnes’s “riveting” The Noise of Time.
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Hitler’s rise: “On the one hand, the Leader’s will was supposed to be absolute and monocratic, and anyone who could claim convincingly that he was carrying out ‘the Führer’s will’ would get his way. On the other, a chaotic, ‘Darwinian’ struggle of overlapping Nazi institutions raged as each competed to make up Hitler’s mind for him. Behind all this was the weird, slovenly manner in which Hitler formed policies. Sometimes he made rapid and fateful choices and stuck to them (the Night of the Long Knives in 1934). But often he watched a policy emerge from some underling who thought he was ‘working towards the Führer’, and then adopted it as his own ‘irrevocable decision’. Occasionally, especially when someone close to him misbehaved, he would retire into a dither that could last for days, unable to make his mind up until prompted by his worried inner circle.”
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Dogs descended from two separate wolf populations, not one, new study suggests.
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The University of Chicago’s junky new building project.
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Essay of the Day:
Da’wah is more dangerous than Jihad. Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains why in The New Criterion:
“Do you know what Jihad is? Everybody knows what Jihad is. Do you know what Da’wah is? This is critical. We are almost fifteen years from 9/11, and most Americans, and most Europeans, know what Jihad is, but they don’t know what Da’wah is. Da’wah is the process of Islamization. Da’wah is the strategy of Islamizing every single aspect of society and politics to reflect Islamic law (Shariah). Da’wah is also what leads to Jihad. If you don’t know what Da’wah is, then you will never understand Jihad. Da’wah and jihad are linked, as the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD noted in a 2004 report titled From Dawa to Jihad: “The network strategy, international missionary efforts, and the interaction or even interwovenness of Dawa and Jihad demonstrate the relationship between the various forms of radical Islam and the phenomenon of radical-Islamic terrorism.” The AIVD defined the risk of da’awah to free, open societies as follows: ‘The Dawa-oriented forms of radical Islam are not necessarily violent by nature, but nevertheless they generate important security risks. Dawa is usually interpreted as “re-Islamisation” of Muslim minorities in the West. These minorities are seen as “oppressed brothers” who should be liberated from the “yoke of Western brainwashing.” The groups focusing on Dawa follow a long-term strategy of continuous influencing based on extreme puritanical, intolerant and anti-Western ideas. They want Muslims in the West to reject Western values and standards, propagating extreme isolation from Western society and often intolerance towards other groups in society. They also encourage these Muslims to (covertly) develop parallel structures in society and to take the law into their own hands. What they mean is that Muslims in the West should turn their backs on the non-Islamic government and instead set up their own autonomous power structures based on specific interpretation of the Sharia.’
“It should be noted, however, that da’wah efforts of Islamization are not limited to Muslim minorities in the West.
“You do not understand the threat of the day if you do not know what Da’wah is. And here we are: I’m in the company of friends, conservatives, people who care about the idea of America. And you do not understand, you do not know what Da’wah, the competing idea, is. You’re honoring me, and I’m thankful, but I almost want to say to all of you who do not know what Da’wah is, ‘Shame on you.’ Do you know why I want to say that? Because when we look back in history to when our fathers and grandfathers and our ancestors were confronted with bad ideas, and we reflect on it, we say, in the comfort of our sofas, ‘How did they not see? How could they not know it? How did you not know what Hitler was up to? Well, they may not have known it in the 1930s, but then in the early 1940s, they should have known it.’
And here we are in the information age, and you don’t know what Da’wah is. Here we have a bad idea with a strategy, with agents, with resources, and you have no idea what it is. If you don’t understand what Da’wah is, you don’t understand the role that a country like Saudi Arabia plays. Our president, Barack Obama—I’m a black woman, so, I think, in the climate of today, when only black people may say negative or critical things about black people—you will permit me to say: I’m not really keen on him. But he’s our president and he represents us. And he’s now in Saudi Arabia. And when I learned that he actually didn’t like the Saudis, I thought, ‘Well, there’s something.’ Everybody’s been asking me, is there anything you could ever like about President Obama? And I thought, ‘I love the fact that he doesn’t like the Saudis.’ But he’s in Saudi Arabia and he’s not going to be talking about Da’wah.
“Da’wah is a project to Islamize, to transform—it’s religious imperialism. In practice, it often entails Saudi religious imperialism. And if you know where Indonesia is and what Indonesia was, and the fact that it is the largest Muslim majority country in the world, and if you see what Saudi religious influence did in Indonesia, what they did in Pakistan, what they did in various parts of Africa, then you understand what cultural imperialism is. If you don’t understand that in our age, you have absolutely no right to judge those Germans and delightful people behind the Iron Curtain who subscribed to Stalin and what came after him.”
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Image of the Day: Italian Air Force
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Poem: Raymond Queneau, From Chêne et Chien II
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