Damascus and Aleppo, Syria's two largest cities, both claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited cities in recorded history. Few countries, and surely none as small as Syria, have that sort of civilisational continuity to disagree about. Perhaps that provides an additional tragic resonance to the descent of Syria into a brutal and dangerous civil war; but none, perhaps, would have been needed, given that one of the participants in that war, ISIS, has justifiably become the focus of the world's fear.
How to write about something like ISIS, tell the stories of places like Syria? What context and explanation can one provide, and what tone conveys the horror best? Three recent books take different approaches, and I'm struggling to make up my mind as to which succeeds. The first, ISIS: A History, by Fawaz Gerges, an academic at the London School of Economics, focuses tightly on the origins of the organisation, its beliefs, and how its personnel and ideas derive from and rival al-Qaeda, the Ba'athists, and various Arab regimes. The second, The Morning They Came for Us: Despatches from Syria, by veteran war reporter Janine di Giovanni, shares the stories of people she talked to in Syria for six months in 2012, as the first Arab Spring protests turned into a sectarian civil war. And the third, And Then All Hell Broke Loose, is a personal history of the past 15 or so years from the American television journalist Richard Engel, who seems to be single-handedly keeping the "dashing war correspondent" stereotype alive by repeatedly landing in quiet West Asian capitals weeks before they explode into violence.
Mr Engel's book is fast-moving, beginning with his arrival in the peaceful Cairo of 1996 - still more than a year before the bloody attacks on tourists there began the jihadist era - and taking in the Camp David negotiations with Arafat, 9/11, the Second Palestinian Intifada, the fall of Baghdad, the chaos of Occupied Iraq, Israel's destruction of Lebanon, the defiance of Qaddafi, and the rise of ISIS. In most cases, Mr Engel was there, and he will tell you how he got there, too. At times this interpolation of his own voice can be deeply irritating - I'm not sure I need a description of the difficulties of being Baghdadi during the Occupation to be interrupted by Mr Engel's revelations about what it was doing to his love life - but on other occasions it works.
Perhaps most so when he explains what it was like to live under Mubarak in Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the streets and the petty bureaucracy, and how the atmosphere changed in Cairo between the late 1990s and 2011, when Tahrir Square topped that "foolish old man". ISIS-style Salafist-jihadists - a term Mr Gerges also uses - are ideologically identical to the less violent Salafists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the various Tablighs, Mr Engel insists. They could sit down and agree about everything expect how to achieve their ends. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves frequently about both the similarity and the difference.
Mr Engel's book is quick, crisp and readable, the long-form of a man who notes that he has spent ages compressing stampedes killing a thousand people into minute-long segments. Ms di Giovani - the Middle East Editor of Newsweek and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair - can practice a very different sort of journalism, and it shows. Her book is almost self-consciously literary, with jerky transitions and single-sentence paragraphs, with a magazine writer's tendency to underline the pathos where a simple description - in this newspaper writer's opinion - might have been more effective. But she also has a gift for character, and for bringing the Syrians she met alive. She is at her best, perhaps, with the members of the doomed Assadian aristocracy of Damascus - one vivid passage, in which she looks down on them partying in a plush hotel as rebellion builds up beyond the barricades, and wants to rush down and warn them of the fate of Sarajevo, is particularly evocative.
Mr Engel seems to have met an as, or even more, interesting cast of characters - at one point in Baghdad, he notes that he had already acquired an acquisitive driver with a 19-year old upper-class mistress, and a policeman working private security for him who was cheap because he had a drinking problem, and a minder appointed by Saddam's regime who worried more about the state of his beloved brown corduroy suit than anything else. Mr Engel declares he is well on the way to collecting Evelyn Waugh-ish, Scoop-like material, but he never follows through completely on that promise. I wish he had.
Ms di Giovanni's book is disturbing, but the lack of context leaves you dissatisfied. Mr Engel's book provides eminently reasonable context, but you can't help thinking that some of it feels not-quite-right - he provides apparently contradictory assessments of the relationship between Arab autocrats and Islam at various points, for example. Mr Gerges' history, although written as dryly as such histories can be, is nevertheless irreplaceable by journalistic narratives. If the tone is dry, the material is, sadly, sanguine enough.
My only quibble with Mr Gerges's book is that, unlike Mr Engel, he refers to the "abandonment" of the Syrian opposition with no words of explanation for what that meant - in particular, the inconsistent approach of Barack Obama's White House. Mr Engel's dismissal of the Obama Doctrine as timidity and vacillation provided a crucial additional bit of context, something Mr Gerges should have built on much more. Character, narrative, and context - civil war stories need all three. But, clearly, it's difficult to get them all in one book.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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