What is being right worth? A triumphalist, exceptionalist society like our own tends to set its ideas in cement, but received ideas should always be subject to new light arriving from distant stars. Here is one example. Our received notion of the origins of Islam center on the idea that the 40-year-old Muhammed, a well-travelled merchant, clearly heard the angel Gabriel and so a new Abrahamic faith was born. But we know little else about the 50-year period that preceded the dawn of Islam. Historians have been able to recover very little knowledge of what was going on in the Arabian peninsula. Now G.W. Bowersock in The Throne of Adulis [Oxford University Press] sheds some important light. In the 50 years before Islam burst upon the world and quickly conquered a very large part of it, the Sassanian Persians, who were to fall to the Islam-bearing Arabs, had been messing around on the peninsula. So had the the Ethiopians from across the Red Sea in Africa. And, to matters even more interesting, a Jewish kingdom based in Yemen had been exerting its influence. They were all to fall to Muhammed’s Arab armies. Proving what? Well, many things, not least of which is that what we think we know, what we think we understand is always subject to new information, and if American society truly understood and embraced that it would be far less polarized than it is today. It would not seem so almighty important to be right. At the end of the day, what is being right worth?
Posted on: Mon, 09 Dec 2013 16:30:33 +0000
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