Muslims in the media/summer reading selection – Former Salon editor’s new book “Zeitoun,” on a Syrian Muslim immigrant’s experience of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath.

Excerpt from review:

Its protagonist is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant turned New Orleans contractor and landlord who stays in the city when the rising waters of Lake Pontchartrain rupture the levees in late August of 2005. Zeitoun finds himself nearly alone in an eerily quiet drowned city, which he patrols for several days in a second-hand canoe. Along with a loose network of other New Orleanians who stayed through Katrina, Zeitoun rescues stranded elderly people, feeds abandoned dogs, and grills lamb with friends on the roof of his flooded Victorian in the historic Uptown district.

Although Zeitoun has stayed behind primarily to protect his own property — while his American-born wife, Kathy, and their four children drive north to stay with relatives in Baton Rouge — he comes to see his mission in New Orleans as something much larger. While the outside world receives grossly exaggerated reports of anarchy and violence, Zeitoun finds a sense of purpose in a city that is underwater but largely at peace. A devout Muslim, he begins to wonder whether God has chosen him as a servant and witness in this dire emergency.

After a group of heavily armed men and women, wearing uniforms with no identifying badges, burst into a rental property that Zeitoun and his friends are using as a staging area, he has ample time to repent of his sinful pride. He disappears into a quasi-legal bureaucratic nightmare that resembles a Kafka story but is all too real. Kathy does not hear from him for weeks, and given the hysterical news coverage, assumes the worst. Is Zeitoun’s life insurance paid up? Can she begin again without him?

“Zeitoun” is a story about the Bush administration’s two most egregious policy disasters — the War on Terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina — as they collide with each other and come crashing down on one family.