Future Book Club Meetings

Thursday, March 27th, 6:30pm- On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Thursday, April 24th, 6:30pm- The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

Thursday, May 29th, 6:30pm- A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Kahled Hasseini

Thursday, June 19th, 6:30pm- Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

Please feel comfortable purchasing these books now as they will not be changed. (One option suggested byThe Meghans: www.half.com)

A few items to take note of:

1. Venues for our meetings will be decided prior to the event. If anyone has any suggestions, please fire off an email. My only request is we choose places with appropriate noise levels and a seating arrangement that is conducive to discussions. Oh, yes. And wine. There must always be wine.

2. As the book gets underway, people may volunteer to lead discussions or, at least, submit possible discussion questions which will be compiled and presented at the meeting. Regardless of how you choose to participate, it will be appreciated!

3. Please start thinking of friends/family members/classmates/ perfect strangers who appear easily manipulated who may want to participate in the book club. Now that we have dates and books picked in advance, I’m confident that some of the “new-group” confusion will subside. Just make sure that if you do locate someone who is interested, their email address makes it to Eren so they can be included on all B.C. correspondence.

Future Book Selections

So does anyone else want to make ex-Uncle Gil's autobiography a future selection for our book club?

Meeting Information

I am posting an email sent on Friday in case I did not catch everyone's address. I look forward to seeing you all on the 25th and to receiving your book lists prior.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Hello Everyone-

I hope you are all surviving this interminable Friday afternoon. I have some information regarding upcoming meeting dates as well as a proposition that should allow us to move forward with greater ease.

The next meeting (A Year of Living Biblically) will be taking place on Monday, February 25th as originally planned. The start time, however, has been moved to 7:15pm. We will be meeting at Lockview.

Additional Information: We will be holding a (final) BABC rules and regulations meeting to determine some ground rules, pick the next few books, and, if possible, establish who will be leading these discussions. By deciding some of this in advance, even if we only attempt 2-3months at a time, it will allow us to avoid some of the confusion and provide some much needed stability.

Your ‘To-Do’ List:

1. Send me an email and let me know whether you are able to attend the R & R meeting after our discussion on Monday, February 25th. If not, we will need to look at an alternate date later in the week. (Even if you are unable or unwilling to attend the actual discussion, showing up for the post-meeting would be incredibly helpful.)

2. Begin compiling a list of books that you would enjoy reading with BABC. Ideally, this list will be kept within 5-8. If you are able to include a description and email me your list prior to the 22nd, I will provide everyone with a comprehensive listing that evening because, well, I’m a huge nerd.


3. If you have a calendar, in whatever form you use, please bring it to the meeting so that we have the opportunity to set-up some future dates that accommodate the greatest number of people.

4. If you know of individuals who may enjoy BABC, please encourage them to join. They can check out the blog, attend the meeting, or contact Eren. I would say that you could forward this email or that they could contact me, but it turns out I’m kind of scary and intense re: book club right now and I would probably demand to know their favorite book and then chastise and ridicule them for their choice.

I truly think a little pre-planning, a very little-I promise, will allow for a more relaxed book club experience.

Group Hug.

Thank-you everyone,

Nicole

Benazir Bhutto

'Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West'

She called upon the Islamic world to work toward avoiding a clash of civilizations.
February 12, 2008


There's a Shakespearean quality to the late Benazir Bhutto's life, but if you scour the Bard's tragedies for an appropriate epitaph, the mind tends to settle on "Nothing is, but what is not."

It's no accident that the most ambivalent -- indeed, sinister -- line from "Macbeth" commends itself. The play is, after all, one of the canon's greatest tales of impacted ambition, betrayal and convoluted deceit. It is, in other words, rather like the political history of wretched Pakistan, which, according to Bhutto, "today is the most dangerous place in the world," not least because it is both unstable and nuclear-armed.

Bhutto was twice her country's prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) and had returned from involuntary exile to campaign for a third term when she was assassinated in December. Her killers were Islamic extremists, though many believe they were abetted by the country's notorious security forces. Political killings are woven through Pakistani history like a bright red thread, though the weaver's hand usually is obscure. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto -- also a "populist" prime minister -- was executed by the general who overthrew him. One of her brothers was poisoned; another was shot dead by persons unknown in 1996. She blamed the security forces; others believed her own husband, the notoriously corrupt Asif Ali Zardari, was involved.

"Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West" was finished just two days before the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto, 55, was killed. Her name is alone on the title page, though a "reader's note" by her longtime friend and advisor, Washington political consultant and lobbyist Mark A. Siegel, indicates that he collaborated on the manuscript. In any case, the book is -- like the woman -- alternately fascinating, frustrating and opaque in a dodgy sort of way.

Tumult in Pakistan

In part, it's a story of Bhutto's return and the campaign that followed. In part, it's a fragmentary account of her years preparing for and exercising power in a tumultuous Muslim state. Bhutto's account of these events is, at best, fragmentary and selective. She campaigned -- and presents herself in "Reconciliation" -- as a modernizing, reasonably secular democrat, and so she was.

However, she also was prime minister when fateful connections were made between Pakistan's powerful, shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) group and the militantly fundamentalist Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam and the Afghan Taliban. During her first term, she approved a plan by an ambitious general who ultimately would become president and her chief political rival, Pervez Musharraf, to unleash the fanatic Lashkar-e-Talib militia against the Indians in Kashmir.

Over the years, Bhutto told various stories about her role in the decision to link Pakistani military and intelligence policies to militant Islam. As a Western-educated female leader, she was anathema to her military's new clients -- indeed, they would one day kill her -- but the degree of her enthusiasm for the connections at their inception remains unclear. She later would say that unscrupulous and fundamentalist elements in the Pakistani intelligence service allowed, even encouraged, the groups to slip beyond control for their own purposes. While it's true that it's always dangerous for a lady to mount a tiger, the precise record remains unclear.

Bhutto's record is strewn with such ambiguities. She was, by her own words -- and many of her actions -- a convinced democrat with a populist bent for grass-roots development. Yet she came from a vast, aristocratic family that still holds actual -- not virtual -- feudal sway over large parts of Sindh province. Moreover, she inherited leadership of her Pakistan Peoples Party as a legacy from her father, and her will specified that her mantle was to pass to her husband. He since has stepped aside -- for their son, 19-year-old Bilawal, currently at Oxford. Most democratic parties don't work quite that way. Her commitment to education and development is well documented, yet corruption was a factor both times she was forced from office. Her husband earned the nickname "Mr. Ten Percent."

Nothing is, but what is not.

More tolerant Islam

The most interesting part of Bhutto's book is her argument with Samuel Huntington and the rest of the "Clash of Civilizations" crowd, who said that a confrontation between the West and militant Islam was inevitable after the Cold War was resolved. Historical inevitability always is a dicey prospect, but Bhutto goes well beyond the typical responses by Muslim political leaders. She argues that a substantial part of the work to be done to avoid such a clash must occur in the Islamic world, where a case needs to be made forcefully for more tolerant strains of Islam that are friendly to modernism and civil society. It says something about the state of affairs in the Islamic world that this is a daring, even singular, position for a political leader to take.

That said, Bhutto's contention that Islam is inherently democratic and innately sympathetic to political democracy is a bit of a stretch. Turkey is the only (fitfully) functioning democracy in the Islamic world, and there the heirs to Atatürk's iron-fisted secularism are fighting a rear-guard action. Bhutto cites Jordan and Yemen as democratic successes, but that's a bit of a stretch as well. Similarly, her categorical assertion that development and education are antidotes to Islamic fundamentalism ignores the fact that the most virulent jihadis appear to come from educated, middle- and upper middle-class families. (Consider the Sept. 11 hijackers.) Bhutto's argument for a program of scholarships enabling Muslim students to study in the West neglects to take into account that Khled Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's 9/11 mastermind, and Sayyid Qutb, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and ideological godfather to contemporary jihadism, both were educated in the United States -- and went away our implacable enemies.

Bhutto obviously was right to assert that the West cannot treat conflict with the Islamic world as inevitable. Like every form of hopelessness, that's a destructive -- and self-defeating -- idea. It will take more than simple goodwill and a talismanic invocation of "democracy" to make it otherwise, however. There is a place to begin the discussion, however. It's with an observation and question:

Every economically significant Western country now is home to a substantial Muslim minority, pursuing their lives and practicing their religion according to the dictates of their individual consciences. Not a single Islamic nation is home to a substantial Jewish or Christian minority, though historically many were.

Why?

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

A Year of Living Biblically: The Meeting

Okay people, lets come to a decision here.

Look over the dates above and pick the one that works for you. In the spirit of diplomacy, I have included dates that do not work for me but may be preferable for others. (Generosity of spirit...that's me.)

Edit: Apologies- It should read Thursday, February 21 (not 22)