Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the new prophet (I will call him Teacher from now on) who has appeared in the province of Alberta, growing up in the frontier town of…
Culture
Choosing Which Language to Live In
“I feel closer to an Arab from Morocco than to a Jew from Brooklyn or Boston.” My mother is a Moroccan Jew, born and bred in Tangier, where she also spent…
The Second Machine Age and Its Discontents
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and young cyber tycoon, wants the whole world wired and every human being to have access to the Internet. To bring Wi-Fi to people who…
A Brief History of British Tangier
In my book Freedom and Orthodoxy I make it clear that the classical world order was radically altered by Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the continent that would later bear the…
Jesus Was Not Christian
Not long after I reviewed Reza Aslan’s work on Jesus, I came across Geza Vermes’s excellent study, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (2013), that shows how Jesus’ iconoclastic but…
Sultanic Democracy
The 4th of July is the only holiday that means something to me, not only because I am an American citizen, but also because I live in the modern world,…
Islam and the Enlightenment
As Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Arab and Muslim world are engulfed in flames, sectarian strife, social turmoil, and just plain misery, I keep wondering if these warring…
The Impossible Dreams of a Moroccan Prince
A few years ago, I wrote a review/commentary on The Road from Morocco, a thrilling account by Wafa Faith Hallam, a young, modern Moroccan woman who leads a truly quixotic…
The Past and Future of Israel
The moment I heard about Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, I hastened to get a copy, then another one when I joyfully shared…
Terry Eagleton Reads America
There are few more delightful moments than walking with the pugilistic literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, the Marxist theorist who always speaks his mind as he sees fit. In…