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Fisk

Robert Fisk has a magnum opus out and it has been reviewed to my liking in this week's DAWN. The title is The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (ISBN 1-84115-007-X). Some of the excerpts from the review point towards the nature of the content and I must say they are interesting enough to make the book reach my wishlist.
...As a war correspondent, Fisk has covered every war during the last 30 years in the Middle East and on its periphery from Afghanistan, Algeria and Nagorno-Karabakh to the Islamic heartland between the Gulf and the Mediterranean, a land drenched with blood: the countless Israeli raids into Lebanon, including the 1982 invasion, the Lebanese civil war, Hafez al Assads crackdown on Muslim Brothers in Hama, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Kuwait war, Hizbollahs resistance to Israel in south Lebanon and the Iraq war. It is a personal account of the wars juxtaposed with history...
...Fisks magnum opus is more than a history of modern Middle East, as his powerful pen churns out page after page of what looks like a gripping novel, with war, diplomacy, espionage, adventure, history and drama all rolled into one...
...The theme he returns to time and again is the moral bankruptcy of the Wests policy toward the Muslim world since the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the deceit inherent in the incompatibility between the Sykes-Picot pact and the Balfour declaration on the one hand and the promises made to the Hashemites on the other. That duplicity, he avers, has continued till this day and is to be seen in Americas blind support to Israel and the attack on Iraq...

Some corrections need to be made
...There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet is not the first sentence of the Koran (p 758). In fact, such a verse is not to be found anywhere in the holy book. The nearest verse is in Sura 48 (Fathh), which says Muhammad is Allahs prophet (verse 29). Also the name of the Arab general at Qadsiya was not Ibn Ali Waqas but Ibn Abi Waqas (p 251). Pakistans poet-philosopher Allama Mohammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot not Surkhot (p 1062), it should be foreign not home secretary (p 1147); the year should be 1917 not 1918 (p 1193), the name Abu Zaher (p 351) needs to be checked. It could be Abu Dhar...

You can read the full review here.

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