BOOKS |D E L I G HT S
A different look at Islam
British cavalry charging against Russian forces at the Balaclava.
George Fetherling
RICHARD CATON WOODVILLE
A
s Diplomat is publ ished on ly four times a year, I have a devil of a time rooting out books that haven’t already been reviewed everywhere else but are nonetheless, I hope, ones of topical interest to our readers. The situation is made more complicated by what seems to me (though this may be middle age talking) the ever-increasing speed of world events. Permit me an example. When I began thinking about the column for this issue, the big news was the Russian incursion into Crimea. To diplomat and international canada
me this looked like a promising subject, if only because it was one of those events that seemed somewhat familiar to us because it touched on the most important political concern of our own time: the conflict between Islam and the West. Like so many other wars before and since, the original Crimea crisis (1853 to 1856) began as an argument over Jerusalem. The city was then under the control of the Ottoman Turks, who wished it to be even more Islamic than it already was. At that time, the modern Italian nation was still being assembled from various city-states and regions, and while it had the Vatican, of course, it didn’t yet have Vatican City. France considered itself to be the seat of Roman Catholicism rather than Italy. Catholicism would be the state religion of the French until 1905, and they wished to expand the Catholic footprint in the Holy Land, just as imperial Russia wanted to make it a bigger centre of Orthodox Christianity.
So the French and the Turks joined forces in a war against Russia. They had a little help from the Sardinians and a great deal from Britain, which didn’t really have a horse in the race, but felt that it hadn’t had a jolly good war since Napoleonic times. In the end, little was accomplished except for the death of several hundred thousand people and the waste of a great deal of money. (As I’m writing this, months after Vladimir Putin’s Crimean land grab, the British government has announced that it is finally buying back the bonds issued more than a century and a half ago to help finance its part in the Crimean expedition.) Here’s another instance of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I once spent a lively afternoon with William L. Shirer, the American foreign correspondent who covered the ascent of Nazi Germany for the Chicago Tribune and later for the Hearst newspapers and later still for Edward R. Morrow of CBS. Out of these experiences 71