The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

Most of my writer friends are used to me extolling the virtues of Midori MD notebooks, these fabulous little buggers from Japan: tough signature-bound pages, bendability for comfy back-pocket storage (unlike your average Moleskine), and the ability to lie flat, on any page, at a moment’s notice.

The toughness was especially useful when I took my first Midori on a reporting trip in Costa Rica, where the moisture in the air makes short work of flimsy books.?Back-pocket storage was often necessary while reporting on Occupy Wall Street, when at a moment’s notice I’d have to take off my reporters’ hat and help out on something with both hands. Lying flat, then, came especially in handy on my recent trip to Israel/Palestine when, for fear of the notorious security at Ben Gurion Airport and Israel’s anxiety about anyone seeing its occupation up close, I decided to photograph my entire notebook, upload it, and leave the book itself behind.

Thanks to the Midori’s marvelous ability to lie down on a dime, photographing the whole 176 page notebook took only a few minutes, with no need for fingers in the way to hold the pages to the table.

So get your Midori MD today; the more of us in the United States who do, the more likely they’ll continue being available here. I buy them from?the good folks at MyMaido.com, based in California, who’ve given me great service and the best prices I can find on this side of the Pacific.

And if you want to read about about I saw and did in the Holy Land, start with my first dispatch at Waging Nonviolence. More to come.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

With uprisings having spread from Tunisia to Egypt, across the Arab world, and then in various forms to China, Greece, Spain, Israel, and England, 2011 may join 1789, 1848, and 1968 as a year synonymous with people-power—and no small amount of chaos. Though their aims are more limited, the September 17 and October 6 groups have adopted what seems to be this year’s signature tactic: the sustained occupation of symbolic public spaces. They’re planning to build their movements by holding public assemblies that will last for days, weeks, or even months. Their respective agendas, though not final until they hit the streets, involve curbing corporate influence on politics and society, protecting the environment, and finally ending the costly wars abroad.

Also, don’t miss another short piece that went up yesterday at Killing the Buddha?on the young Wall Street occupiers to be in Tompkins Square Park. And my comprehensive Waging Nonviolence story about them too.

The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.? We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a?political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent Frame. What stuck out for him, and which he was still trying to find the words for, was a subtle but utterly pervasive kind of suspicion, one that often ran in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what.?Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers?Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

We also discussed the transition from violent to nonviolent resistance, blasphemy laws, and even the end of the world. Particularly choice, too, is this passage, where he describes a conversation about colonialism with the great literary theorist Edward Said, whose successor Asad arguably has become:

I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

NS: To what extent are Chinese scholars working in China also studying religion as you are—that is, not only as an artifact of the past, but as something alive and active in contemporary Chinese society?

MY: There is a growing number of Chinese scholars engaged in the study of religious cultures. In the 1980s and ’90s, their work was primarily textual and focused on the historical past of Chinese religious traditions. This was a safe way to deal with a still sensitive topic and to stay out of trouble. Now a new generation of social scientists is looking at the present through fieldwork. Their biggest task is to persuade the government, its many bureaucrats and local officials, and society at large, to think of religion as a promising way to deal with the present and future. They have even started to challenge the Marxist position that religion serves the ruling class and will necessarily disappear.

NS: To what extent do scholars have the freedom to do so publicly?

MY: Actually, there is now almost no constraint on what can be said out loud, but print publication is another matter. Internet discussions, meanwhile, stand in-between what can be said and what can be printed.

NS: So the study of religion in China has become a medium of dissent?

MY: Yes. These scholars are implicitly trying to correct for a century of activist state intervention and prohibition. Intellectuals have been at the forefront of religious revival, and many academic conferences on Buddhism, Daoism, and popular deity cults have laid the groundwork for religious organizations and activities to proceed. Academics serve as advisors or consultants to religious organizations; they are a bridge between religious communities and officialdom. They have called on the state to recognize the vast “underground” Christian communities—about 70 percent of all Christians in China—who refuse to join the state churches. A few are even starting to point out that the decades of hostility towards indigenous religions may be responsible for the dramatic growth of Christianity in the past three decades.? Scholars have also tackled the new problems of the over-commercialization of religion, in which local state tourism and real estate agencies seize upon it to drum up business, riding roughshod over Buddhist or Daoist monks’ ability to run their temples in their own way. Of course, this is still a small segment of the Chinese intelligentsia, and the vast majority still dismiss religion.

NS: […] What can scholars do to be able to speak relevantly, the way you have, to the public—and to each other as well?

RA: I’m very pessimistic about this. Academics have been reveling so long in their own private language, speaking to each other and not to anyone else, that it’s going to be very hard to break through the current paradigm. I’ll give you an example. I wasn’t finished with my Ph.D. when No god but God came out. The book was very successful, but life became miserable for me in my department. Professors who had been working with me suddenly turned their backs to me. Unnecessary obstacles were put in my way. There was an attitude—not just amongst the professors, but amongst my fellow students as well—of Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you take this discussion that we’re having in a room with four people and make it palatable to a large and popular audience? Things got so bad that I actually had to switch departments, and I ended up getting my degree from a different department altogether. That, to me, is an example of the problem academia has, which earns it legitimate criticism for being out of touch with the concerns of people outside of its walls.

NS: How do you think scholars can learn to take part in broader conversations?

RA: It’s often a total waste of time. You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper. You have to be immersed in the kind of world in which there is no division between the academic and the popular. I honestly think that the best hope that we have is to foster a new kind of student, one who doesn’t spend eight years in the basement of Widener Library at Harvard poring over a thirteenth-century manuscript and writing a dissertation on the changes in the vowel markings of a sentence. That kind of scholarship has a very small role in the world we live in now. We need scholars who understand that there is no division between the world of academia and the popular world. Trying to take staid academics and teach them to use words with fewer syllables is not the way to break that wall down.

This week I had the chance to take part in my first “diavlog” at Bloggingheads.tv. I was fortunate to have as my counterpart Richard Amesbury, a scholar who has done some fascinating work about religion in human rights and the politics of New Atheism. We had a good conversation about those things, though I find myself wishing I could say most of it over again, a bit differently. It’s the reason, I guess, I write rather than TV-anchor or act. With writing, there is revision. There is silence and solitude. There is pausing and thinking. There is sharing with trusted friends, then revising again, in solitude, and sharing again.

That said, Bloggingheads does a great service by replacing the talking head with the talking person, such as we are.