Miembrojameshider

I have always been fascinated by what you might call the pathology of ideas -- how they mutate as different societies inherit, steal or are infected by foreign concepts, customs and gods. How a Disney character can become an icon of Islamist martyrdom, how we invent gods because we are afraid of dying, then end up dying for these invented gods. Having seen at first hand, and all too often, the most extreme results of these ever-warping ideas, I sat down and tried to write about them in "Spiders of Allah," the result of seven years covering conflict across the Middle East as a journalist. Because the history of the region stretches back so far, the ideas that have come out of it have had millennia to warp and twist. You can see front lines that date back thousands of years, and which are still being fought over, affecting people's lives around the world. And what really fascinated me was, what if many of these central ideas are not only absurd, but extremely dangerous?

After Spiders was published, I covered the Arab Spring, and for a while there on Tahrir Square and Benghazi, I was hopeful the rational might sweep away the power of the supernatural. Unfortunately, the subsequent chaos in the region has shown the abiding power of religious division, sectarianism and the deep-seated power of hatred and fear.(less)