Disordered World

In this brilliant exploration of the post-9/11 world, leading Lebanese novelist and intellectual Amin Maalouf sets out to understand how we have arrived at such disorder. He explores three different but related aspects of disorder: intellectual (manifested in an unleashing of statements on identity that allow no possibility of peaceful co-existence or debate), economic and financial (that is exhausting the earth's resources), and climatic (the result of turning a blind eye to the consequences of rampant industrialization).

Instead of seeing the current disorder of the post-9/11 world as 'a clash of civilisations' Maalouf sees it as the 'exhaustion of two civilisations', a period in which humanity has reached its threshold of 'moral incompetence'. Islam and the West have theoretical coherence, he says, but in practice each betrays its true ideals: the West is unfaithful to its own enlightenment values, which has discredited it in the eyes of the people to whom it has introduced democracy by force; while Islam finds itself condemned to a headlong rush into radicalism. These symmetrical disorders are only some of the elements in a global disorder that requires humanity as a whole to take responsibility for its future and face up to the urgent tasks such as climate change and the global financial crisis that threaten us all.

is a plea by one of the major writers of the last twenty years for intelligence, tolerance and a sense of urgency in order that we develop an adult vision of our patrimony, our beliefs, our differences and the future of the planet which is our common home.

Autorentext

Amin Maalouf was born in Lebanon in 1949. A journalist and director of the daily newspaper An-Nahar, he lived in Beirut until the start of the civil war in 1975, when he left for Paris with his family. His life straddles East and West - he reads and writes in Arabic, but chooses to publish in French. He refuses to be limited to one identity, either Arab or French, but chooses actively to be both simultaneously. A novelist, essayist and memoirist, he has won prestigious prizes, including the Prix Goncourt for his novels and other books which have been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Paris. George Miller is the translator of No and Me. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique's English-language edition, and the translator of Conversations with my Gardener by Henri Cueco and Inside Al-Qaeda by Mohammed Sifaoui.