Review of "From The Holy Mountain: a journey in the shadow of Byzantium" by William Dalrymple

I've listened to William Dalrymple on the "Empire" podcast, and I think of him as a decent, progressive, liberal and intelligent sort of guy. This book came as a bit of shock. The framework is him following in the footsteps of a learned Byzantine monk who decided to go with a mate to visit the monasteries of the Byzantine empire, so he goes to the same monasteries, now much depleted or deserted and left as tiny islands of Christianity in a world that is mostly Muslim (and in one small corner, Jewish). He meets a lot of monks who he experiences as very good, ascetic and holy, and he repeats apparently unquestioningly the bollocks that they believe about demons, possession, miracles and relics. 

He's learned in a way that upper class Brits who have had a "classical" education can be, and he can draw on lots of background about the history of the Empire and of religion to make it interesting. As we went through I occasionally noted places where he'd left things out that didn't favour his narrative of beleaguered Eastern Christians keeping alive a flame of holiness. 

The book is from 1998, and what's changed and what hasn't in terms of the contemporary politics that he describes is interesting. The Kurdish PKK has laid down its arms and ended its guerrilla war against Turkey, and the Islamists that are only just beginning to appear on the horizon in 1998 are now firmly in power. The lovely orderly oasis of religious toleration that he finds in Syria is its exact opposite, and probably wasn't nearly as nice as he seemed to think it was even back then. Lebanon is an even bigger shit heap than it was then.  I was reminded by the book about the trail of massacre and counter-massacre...I suspect that almost all of my friends know about the Deir Yassin massacre, but I bet not one of them has heard about the Damour massacre, when Fatah and Palestinian Ba'athist fighters slaughtered hundreds of Lebanese Christians in retaliation for an earlier massacre, and for which the subsequent slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre was claimed as a retaliation by some of the victims' relatives. 

The Israeli pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, and persecutions in Israel proper, have notched up a gear - he doesn't mention or go to Gaza, which is funny because there's quite a lot Byzantine Christian stuff there, including a very old and famous monastery. 

And his analysis of the Mubarak regime and its "crackdown" on the Muslim Brotherhood is so misguided as to be comical. I guess "experts", and people who visit and talk to others on the ground, are not really better informed than anyone else. Did the Western intelligence agencies see the fall of Mubarak coming? I don't think so.