My book Abraham Divided: An LDS Perspective on the Middle East has badly needed an update since its revised, second, edition came from the press in June 2001. (Just think, for example, of what occurred later that very year, on 11 September!)
Well, I’m working on it. Occasionally.
The trick (beyond getting the substantial stretches of time that I crave) is to not overburden the revision with details, not to make it too academic. It needs to concentrate on the essentials and, while selecting good illustrative specifics, to avoid getting lost — and losing the audience — in the weeds and the tall grass.
Abraham Divided was essentially a study of the Arabs and of Islam among the Arabs. Since then, for various reasons, Western attention has most definitely widened its focus beyond simply the Arab-Israeli conflict, to include Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan, as well as, to a lesser degree, such places as Pakistan and Indonesia.
Accordingly, I’ll have to spend a bit more time on the Shi‘i/Sunni divide, as well as on the expansion of Islam into those non-Arab regions and on the nature of Islam in those non-Arab environments. Probably, too, I’ll need to say a few things about Islam in the West.
Obviously, too, I need to talk about other groups that didn’t even exist when I first wrote the book in roughly 1992, or that, in any case, weren’t as prominent as the are now — groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qa‘ida, and the so-called “Islamic State.” On the whole, Islamic “fundamentalism” has come dramatically to the fore since my first edition, so I’ll need to discuss it and to provide at least a bit of background on the Muslim Brotherhood and other analogous movements.
One way to wander off into the weeds would be to get bogged down in detailed specifics. And, of course, those are the sorts of things that will, all too often, be largely obsolete not long after the new book comes from the press — if not, indeed, even before.
When it appears, the book won’t be identified as a third edition of Abraham Divided, even though it will be substantially built upon those earlier editions. That title pointed rather specifically to the division between the Arabs and the Israelis, who are both Semites and, therefore, cousins. It was also, I think, a slightly misleading title, in that it may have suggested to some that it would give equal attention to both Arab Muslims and Jews, which it never even attempted to do. But this new book will be (relatively) less Arab-focused and (relatively) more Islam-focused, and, although Arabic and Arabs will still have priority of place in it — not merely because I’m an Arabist, but primarily because they enjoy priority in the formative history of Islam itself — there will be some added attention to non-Semitic, non-Abrahamic peoples such as Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and Malays.
Anyhow, those are some of my thoughts about the forthcoming book — which is still some distance from being finished.
I haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory new title. Suggestions are welcome.
Posted from Portland, Oregon
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