from the only man in the street, a religious elder dressed in a black robe and white turban. He would not breathe a word about his faith or politics to an outsider, my guide explained; members of this small Islamic sect have long since learned to keep their own counsel. On we drove toward the Syrian border.
Now at the lookout the guide points beyond the peacekeeping base to the remains of a Druze village destroyed by retreating Syrian forces, and shakes his head.
“Too much war,” he mutters, leading me to the kiosk, where he insists that I try a Druze pita—a wrap filled with labneh, a soft, sour cheese, almost a yogurt, sprinkled with za’atar, which is a blend of spices including oregano, dried sumac, sesame seeds, and salt.
From here we descend to the Sea of Galilee, past fields of obsidian and scrub, military bases, and an extensive system of rain catchments and reservoirs that drained the wetlands and turned this desert into an agricultural oasis. The three sources of the Jordan River are located on the Golan, whose vineyards ensure that water is regularly turned into wine, and across the river in which Jesus was baptized we stop in Capernaum, so that I can walk in the land of his ministry. There is no time to visit the synagogue in which he preached, or climb the hill above a banana grove to see the church raised on the site on which he delivered the Sermon on the Mount, or board the wooden boat that carries pilgrims across the lake, on which he sailed with his disciples. But I do wander through the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, the altar of which is built around the stone on which he is said to have laid five loaves of bread and two fishes to feed five thousand, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophesy to leave his birthplace in Nazareth and dwell in Capernaum—where “the people who sat in darkness saw a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” Three Indian women in bright blue saris fall to their knees to touch the stone, and then I do the same.
Another light had dawned in America when I made the journeys to Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East described in this book. After 9/11, the argument ran, threats to the homeland were to be viewed in a new light, through the prism of terrorism—politically motivated violence against civilians, to be precise. Thus the fear of another terrorist attack prompted Congress to pass controversial legislation limiting civil liberties, while offering little resistance to Bush administration decisions to flout its treaty obligations, forge a doctrine of preemptive war, invade and occupy Iraq, ignore the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, and implement a wide-ranging domestic surveillance program—decisions that defied not only legal precedent and common sense but also the values upon which this country was founded. When in the summer of 2007 a nominee for the position of attorney general refused to say in his confirmation hearing that waterboarding (an interrogation technique developed in the Spanish Inquisition, employed in Nazi Germany and North Korea, and prosecuted as a war crime for over a century) was a form of torture, it became clear that something fundamental had changed in our body politic—in our soul, that is.
How and why this came to be will furnish historians, scholars, and writers with material for generations. For my part I wished to take an alternate reading on the Age of Terror, traveling to distant parts of the earth to record some of the ferment marking our days and nights. For it is at such fraught moments in history that civilizations may move in radically different directions. Just as the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth coincided with the first stirrings of revolt against the Roman Empire, so now we are witnessing changes—political and social, technological and environmental—presaging the end of one order and the creation of another: a world that bewilders, frightens, and inspires. And it seemed to me that a description of the conditions at hand—of our predicament, if you will—might begin to clarify who and what we are becoming.
This, then, is a book composed in the key of terror. The vertigo experienced at the edge of a cliff; the involuntary shaking that attends a brush with death; the way that a child clings to her mother when a stranger approaches—terror is a fact of life, which poets and divines have addressed since time immemorial. It is the ground note of much of what is best in humanity—and worst. It is not easily explained away or overcome; and if we celebrate those brave souls who transform their encounters with it into enduring works of literature, art, and music, our destinies are also inscribed by those who seize on it for their own gain. From the Paleolithic cave paintings of wild beasts in Lascaux to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time the human ability to translate terror into beauty has been one of our distinguishing features—no less so than the machinations of those who exploit it for political advantage. History turns on an axis of terror.
The Tree of the Doves is my take on that axis. Ceremony, Expedition, War: these essays represent three attempts—essais, in Montaigne’s original conception—to explore some portion of experience, some way of being in the world, through the lens of terror and its sometime corollary, courage. I begin with the proposition that our lives are shaped by ceremonies, expeditions, and wars, the origins of which are rooted at least partly in fear. “Every angel is terrifying,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Duino Elegies—an insight integral to ceremonies of celebration and praise, of healing and mourning; to expeditions undertaken for pleasure, profit, or the pursuit of meaning; to wars waged justly and unjustly. This dark knowledge informed my itinerary, which took me to three very different parts of the world to explore how individuals and societies are framed by this triad. What follows is an account of impressions and encounters from my travels—geographical, historical, literary, political, and religious.
The performance of a banned ritual in the Malaysian state of Kelantan is the setting for a meditation, in Ceremony, on the clash between modernity and tradition in the Islamic world. The events of 9/11 demonstrated that the outcome of the battle for Islam’s future will also have important ramifications for the West, and so I was keen to hear from Malaysian artists, writers, and politicians grappling with the issue of Islamic identity. The relationship between Islam and the West, which from the rise of the Muslim caliphate in the seventh century has helped to define both civilizations, has grown more complex in the Age of Terror—a truth made clear in my meetings with those on the front lines of a long war of ideas. What I witnessed in the jungle may or may not be a harbinger of things to come, but it did offer a way to think about a society in transition, a palimpsest in which to read layer upon layer of aesthetic, religious, and political experience.
In Expedition, I retrace part of an epic voyage made in 1921 by the French poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar—a symbol, it seems to me, of the human drive to explore, to attempt to grasp life in its entirety, and then to set forth again. In every historical period the clocks are set at different times, figuratively speaking; history unfolds in such distinct rhythms around the world that it is sometimes difficult to imagine that events far removed from one another—the first moon walk, say, and the Cultural Revolution—are concurrent. And nowhere is this more apparent than in China, whose dizzying changes in the modern era often bewilder its inhabitants and observers alike. From his post in Beijing, though, Perse was an astute judge of a society that from a Western perspective was peripheral to the march of history but which in the fullness of time would edge ever closer to the center. All eyes were on Europe then, reeling after the carnage of World War I, and while China’s interests had figured into the deliberations of the Paris Peace Conference its fate did not matter to Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues. But the world’s most populous country could not be ignored forever. The same is true today. Our attention may now be on the Middle East, which is still sorting out the maps drawn up at Versailles, but we also live in what some call the Chinese Century. Where to look for a guide to navigate us through those puzzling landscapes governed by a different sense of time, of history? A great poet may hold in mind the contradictory rhythms and ideas integral to a global perspective, and Perse’s cool-eyed, ceremonial verses, which measure time and distance in a unique fashion, fusing occidental and oriental styles of thought, offer in their music another way to map the present: a new route to the interior of Asia—and of ourselves. It may be wise to heed the words and example of the man who finished off his Nobel lecture with this maxim: “And it is enough for the poet to be the guilty conscience of his time.” Saint-John Perse was such a conscience.
The final essay, War, recounts my journey in the spring of 2007 to Syria, Jordan, Israel and the West