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venue books
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Common Ground
By Review By Robert Woltman
Gary Paul Nabhan’s book presents a much-needed counterpoint to the mass media’s steady drum-beating about the historic “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim/Arab world and the West.
Contrary to the simplistic misconcep-tions arising from an “us versus them” mentality, Nabhan’s book explains how, for centuries, Middle Eastern and Western cultures have interacted in language, agriculture and cuisine.
Nabhan has written well-told stories of his Lebanese ancestors and finely crafted, reflective essays on the deserts of the Middle East and the American Southwest.
Nabhan reveals a complex heritage of commonalities that science has seldom explored and that society in general has not known.
An example is Nabhan's examination of the role of “crypto-Muslims” in the settlement of the New World. While much has been written about the “crypto-Jews” in New Spain — and in New Mexico, especially — that has not been the case for Muslims.
Like their Jewish counterparts, they fled the Spanish Inquisition and went into hiding, disguising their true religion and ethnicity. However, their persistent influences can be seen in the domes, arches and walk-in cisterns of Southwest architecture; the terraced fields and irrigation practices of desert farms (“acequia” is one example of many Spanish words of Arabic origins); and the myriad spices such as cinnamon, allspice and cloves, brought to the New World and, more significantly, blended in ways traditional to Middle Eastern cuisines.
Imagine the deserts of the Middle East, and that icon of the dunes, the camel, surely comes to mind. Not surprisingly, Nabhan devotes his first chapter to the quirky history of the camel in America's deserts and to the colorful characters associated with it.
Nabhan's travels in research for the book took him not only through the deserts of the Southwest and Mexico, where his family emigrated, but back to Lebanon as well as to Egypt, Oman and Libya.
His travels there compelled him to end the book with an eloquent plea for understanding and reconciliation in a “broken” world. War not only destroys people, but leaves their sacred places, their antiquities, their entire culture in ruins. The horrors of “ethnic cleansing” are notorious, but as a scientist, Nabhan decries “ecological cleansing” as well.
These deserts are not simply geographic locations, these countries not merely lines on a map.
“When peace is shattered,” he states, “the cultural memories that make ‘place' more than mere ‘space' are shattered as well.”
A Tucson, Ariz., resident, Nabhan has spent most of his adult life as an ecologist, ethnobotanist and author of more than 20 books.
Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque writer.
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