Just a reminder to everyone else - it’s not only allowed, it’s encouraged for you to post links to your best stuff at your own blogs! And, if anyone wants to start a Journal, then let us know - Journals are fully-hosted Wordpress blogs in their own right (perfect for longer form essaying, too…)

I also second Scott’s recommendation of Sven Lindqvist, especially A History of Bombing, which is one of the most unconventional histories you will ever read. Scott notes this about Lindqvist’s work:

Beginning with an Italian aviator dropping a hand grenade from a light plane over Tripoli, [Sven] Lindqvist shows that almost all the torments Europeans inflicted on one another were first tested and refined in the colonies and on people whose rights and sufferings were not considered to have risen to the level of white Europeans.

*Thanks to gess for this title. I thought the same when reading the review in my copy of LRB, but since he put it down into 1s and 0s first the credit need to go the right person.

The book is called Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. Davidson’s views were noted in an earlier post. In the book he points out how the economic success, dwindling oil resource, and need for foreign investment “could clash with the ideological, religious and cultural legitimacy” of the ruling family.

Looks like a spectacular own goal, really. There is no point in talking about knowledge economies and university cities if this is the attitude to critical thought (and this book was published by Columbia University Press, so it had been peer reviewed). However, Faisal Devji’s words are worth noting:

“This management (of information) is not political so much as corporate, resembling regulations common in workplaces around the world, since the UAE is as much a corporation as a country. In this respect it represents the global future of politics and capitalism…”

It wouldn’t surprise me if they lifted the ban, eventually.

(And yes, this is what you can call censorship.)

[T]he complete absence of a non-migrant (or distant migrant) African-American Muslim voice in [Melody] Moezzi’s book [War On Error: Real Stories of American Muslims] is troubling. There is much bitterness among African-American Muslims about what many see as the dominance of migrant Muslims from the Middle East and Asia in Muslim religious and community affairs. African-American Muslims – whether of the more heterodox “Nation of Islam” variety or from more mainstream denominations - are a growing force in American Islam. America’s first two Muslim Congressmen are both African-American. It seems curious that Moezzi could not find a single African-American Muslim prepared to talk about his or her faith on the record.