While we are on the subject of Arabia, The Religious Policeman brings news of a pardoning in the Magical Kingdom:

I must get around to writing something on that enchanted country soon.

The 18th Arab League Summit was held in Khartoum this week. Never one for pulling punches, Lebanon’s Daily Star summed it up as “a venue where bigoted dinosaurs mingle with tyrannical mummies”:

As expected, the delegates were more preoccupied with milking the last drops of mileage out of the Danish doodles than doing anything to help Darfur. In what Al-Jazeera.Net calls “a coup for the Sudanese president,” they rejected the imposition of a UN-led force on the killing fields without his permission — which is forthcoming as soon as Switzerland invades Australia. Admittedly, it was agreed to fund the sadly ineffectual African Union (AU) force with about $150 million; but it has to be said that the offer sounds distinctly more impressive before learning that it will take effect a day after the AU’s mandate expires on September 30. (Putting two and two together here, we may infer that they already know Khartoum intends to refuse renewal.) So far the Arab League has contributed less than one day’s running costs since the force was created in 2004.

This is not to suggest any lack of generosity. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia generously passed to Egypt the right to host next year’s summit. The League also remains the only regional organization whose member states have generously ceded the formal leadership to a single country: since its founding in 1945, the Secretary-General has always been Egyptian (though Egypt was suspended for a while after the Camp David accords with Israel).

But the Arab region has bigger problems — ones that, in a sane world, which ours of course is not, would have been addressed at the summit. Below are some statistics compiled from a number of sources, pertaining to the region stretching from Morocco to Iraq and encompassing a population of 289 million, or five percent of humankind.

Wealth: Although Arab nations control three-quarters of the world’s energy resources, their combined GDP is lesser than Spain’s and a mere fifth of Japan’s. Without oil, they would have a GDP equivalent of Nokia’s revenues.

Growth: The growth in per capita income has stalled for two decades, to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. According to the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, it averaged 0.5 percent between 1982 and 2002. (In comparison, between 1993 and 2003, Vietnam’s GDP tripled.) Sweden, at 9 million inhabitants, attracts more foreign capital than the entire Arab world put together.

Employment: The Arab Labor Organization reported in 2003 that about 25 percent of the active population in the Arab states are unemployed, ranging from 6–17 percent in Gulf countries to over 75 percent in Palestine and Iraq. For young people the unemployment rate is over 50 percent. Educated persons are especially marginalized: 57% of the unemployed Arab population have been educated to secondary level or higher.

Economic equity: Despite the exorbitant petroleum resources of their countries, more than one in five Arabs lives on less than $2 a day, according to the UN. In Egypt — the most populous Arab nation, and one of the least inequitable — 1 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth. In a country that is second in the world in terms of Mercedes Benz ownership, about half of the urban population live in absolute poverty and an estimated 60 percent of same dwell in shanty settlements. Inequality is increasing throughout the region.

Female participation in work force: A 2004 UNIFEM report shows that Arab countries have the lowest female employment rate of any region in the world, at only 28 percent.

Attitudes to gender equality: A survey conducted by the Egyptian government and reported by The Guardian in November 2004 found that one in three women has been beaten by her husband. Eighty-six percent of the women regarded this as normal. Twenty-six percent of women in their 20s believed that they deserve a beating if they burn dinner; 42 percent that they do so if they spend too much money; and 65 percent that they do so if they talk to another man. Conditions are probably as bad or worse in most other Arab nations.

Contentness: One in two Arab youths wants to emigrate. Of those who make it to Europe, over 90 percent stay for good.

Demography: Thirty-eight percent of Arabs are under 14 years old; 60 percent are under 20 years old. The population of the Arab countries is projected to grow to between 410 million and 459 million by 2020.

Urbanization: In the Maghreb countries and Syria, every second inhabitant is now a city dweller. In Iraq, the proportion is two out of three. It is predicted that by 2015, 70 per cent of Northern Africa’s population will live in cities.

Education: About 65 million adult Arabs are illiterate, two-thirds of them women. Education expenditure per capita has declined over the last two decades; in the mid-90s it was only 10 percent of that in industrialized countries. Some 10 million children between 6 and 15 years old do not attend school.

Internet use: Less than four percent of Arabs have access to the Internet, according to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU). This is a lower rate even than in sub-Saharan Africa and means that the region accounts for just 0.5 percent of Internet users. Only one in a hundred Arabs has a personal computer.

Literature: The 2003 Arab Human Development Report speaks of a “severe shortage” of new writing by Arabs. In addition, fewer than 4.4 books per million people are translated throughout the Arab world annually, as compared, for instance, with 519 in Hungary and 920 in Spain. Arab publishers translate only about 330 books yearly, or one-fifth the number rendered into Greek. Incidentally, this is not a new development: during the past millennium, the Arab world has translated into Arabic only as many books as Spanish publishers now annually translate into Spanish. The printing press was banned in the Middle East into the 19th century.

Science: Arab nations spend less than one-seventh of the world average annual investment in research, in relation to the size of overall national economies. There are only a handful Nobel Prize winners from Arab countries.

Governance: Monarchy remains the most dominant form of governance in the Arab countries, eight of which have the institution. Also, the longevity of rulers makes for few successions. Since its founding in 1932, Saudi Arabia has had only six rulers. Bahrain has had three rulers since 1971; Jordan has had four kings since 1946; Kuwait has had four emirs since 1950; Morocco has had three kings since 1957; Oman has had two sultans since 1932; Qatar has had three emirs since 1971. Among the republics, the UAE has had four presidents since 1971; Egypt three since 1952; Tunisia two since 1956. It is noteworthy that in no Arab state has an opposition party yet taken power upon winning an election, unless the Palestinian occupied territories be counted as one.

Regional cooperation: After a half-century of “Arab unity” there is not even a customs union in place. There is less trade between Arab countries even than between sub-Saharan ones.

Liberty: According to two international indices that are widely used to compare levels of freedom — including free speech, civil rights, political rights, free press and government accountability — the Arab region has the lowest level of freedom of any of the world’s seven regions.

A couple of observations in closing. First, it is no mystery that, as The Angry Arab notes in connection with the summit, not a single Arab leader “is liked or respected by his people. Not one. In fact, every one of them is despised, deeply despised, by his people.” Second, this is not about Islam per se, or at least not exclusively. Only about 14 percent of the world’s Muslims are Arabs, and of the larger group, more than half live under elected governments (e.g. Indonesia, India, Turkey, Nigeria, Bangladesh). Many non-Arab Muslim nations are also more prosperous and have greater social mobility, as well as gender equity, than the Arab average.

Third, those who wonder why populist Islamism is on the march across the Arab world can start wondering instead what the hell to do about it.

Via Juan Cole: Ret. Sgt. Major Eric Haney, a founding member of the Delta Force, calls the Iraq war “an utter debacle” and “a horror” which has done “irreparable damage” and “destroyed any credibility” the US enjoyed:

Yawn. What does this nobody’s opinion matter, as long as Chuck Norris remains on board?

Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006)

The jury will withdraw today to sentence Zacharias Moussaoui, who on Monday dashed for what Tim McVeigh called a ‘de luxe suicide-by-cop package’. The NYT:

Moussaoui wants to die, or more precisely: to be killed by the enemy. From his point of view this is infinitely better than rotting in a prison cell, as to his mind it qualifies as martyrdom (shaheed) even though he took no active part in 9/11; cf. e.g. the ahadith collection of Muslim: Vol. 20, No. 4694-6. These are some of the benefits of shaheed, as per ahadith he probably accepts:

1. Guaranteed admission to Paradise (Bukhari: Vol. 9, Book 93, No. 555, 621). Ordinary Muslims gain entry only if their good deeds outweigh their sins; otherwise they go to Hell.
2. Instant admission to Paradise (Muslim: Book 1, No. 515). Ordinary Muslims must wait until the Day of Resurrection for their judgment; in the meantime, they suffer the ‘punishment of the grave’.
3. Preferential treatment in Paradise (Bukhari: Vol. 4, Book 52, No. 53; Muslim: Book 19, No. 4440-1; Book 20, No. 4634-6).
4. The right to intercede for seventy family members so these also go to Paradise (Abu-Dawud: Book 14, No. 2516).

There are of course many Muslims who reject some or all of this, but not among Moussaoui’s ilk.

As I have argued in the case of Mohammed Bouyeri — Theo van Gogh’s murderer, who similarly yearned for execution — the upshot here is that life in prison is clearly a stronger deterrent than capital punishment with respect to Jihadi terrorism. The terrorist is not afraid to die whether he succeeds in his mission or not; quite the opposite. If anything can make him lose heart, it is the prospect of being caught alive to suffer lifelong incarceration in a humiliating infidel environment where opportunities for ’struggle in the path of God’, as he understands it, are next to nil.

I am not saying this as a bleeding-heart liberal. Indeed, I also happen to think that even death with no Paradise affixed is too good for such vermin.

The Israel lobby’s rapid reactionary force has wasted no time dismissing Mearsheimer and Walt’s brave LRB piece on said lobby. Yet the analysis also draws flak from more progressive quarters. At CounterPunch, Joseph Massad writes from a Chomskyite point of view:

Note the change from ‘groups who oppose Israel’ to ‘Arab dictatorships’. Well yes, exactly. Despite being Israel’s sugar daddy, the US has been able to bribe a whole swath of Arab dictatorships with cash and arms. This, however, hardly endears the US to the groups opposing Israel, since the dictatorships (including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, pre-coup Mauritania, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia) are quite unloved by these groups (notably the Muslim Brotherhood and some of its spawns). What is more, thanks in part to the Palestine question, the groups are gaining enough popularity to flush out existing regimes at the ballot box if allowed to, as they should be according to US policy. And yes, Hamas’ triumph over the über-corrupt, US-funded Fatah is a case in point.

Meanwhile, Hitchens writing on Slate is at pains to defuse the charge — which Mearsheimer and Walt nowhere actually make — that Israel produced al-Qaeda:

Indeed, but is it not equally inane to conflate the strategic visions of the upper echelons in the radical Salafi movement with whatever drives some kid from Yorkshire to detonate himself on the London tube? The cannon fodder and the chief ideologue need not see eye to eye, as evidenced by al-Zawahiri’s rueful admissions that Israeli occupation is what rouses the rabble. In a July 2005 letter* to al-Zarqawi, he notes:

Oh, and Chris? Here is the subsequent sentence:

Massad and Hitchens are right that neither Arab dictatorships nor the cadres of Islamic revolution give a damn about Palestinian statehood. What they conveniently ignore is that both types of actor exploit the popular outrage at Israel for bait and switch. With the former, the switch is continued kleptocracy justified by the need for ‘unity against the Jews’; with the latter, ‘defensive Jihad’ against ‘Jewish-crusader aggression’. As neither wants the conflict resolved, the only question is who stands to benefit more from it in the long run. The answer is probably their mutual enemy, the “moderate Islamists” of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And since neither of these three is to Hitchens’ nor Massad’s liking, might conceivably a reappraisal of this whole problematic be in order? Needless to say, I am not holding my breath.

*) There are some doubts as to the letter’s authenticity, but the same point is made in al-Zawahiri’s book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.

News from America: in the world’s supposedly leading nation, whose fine constitution is founded entirely on Enlightenment values, the tiny atheist minority are pariah, a study finds.

While I knew that declared atheists are unelectable for office above county level in the USA, I naïvely thought George Bush sr. went out on a limb when he opined (and yes, he really did) that atheists shouldn’t be regarded as citizens. Apparently he was expressing common sense.

Salman Rushdie — himself not unacquainted with the zealous mindset — sums up the attitude in question:

I wonder what blinkers such faithful bigots don to sustain their delusion of superiority. Aside from the philosophical hollowness of deriving ethics from the command of supernatural beings — exposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro some 2,400 years ago — the idea sits rather poorly with the facts. Let us briefly consider the evidence.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, wherein 800,000 men, women and children were slashed to pieces with machetes (or, if babies, bashed SS-style against the trees) took place in a devoutly Catholic country. The faith was introduced by the same Belgian colonialists who, moved by a mix of race theory and divide et impera, did such a splendid job of setting the Tutsis up against the Hutus, after their impeccably Catholic king had transformed the neighboring Congo basin into Hell. The US President who literally spent more time at the office pushing cigars up his intern’s vagina than stopping the butchery — though the latter was within his powers — is a Southern Baptist whose speeches brim with spiritual uplift. In Sudan another genocide is in its fourth year, conducted at the hands of glowing theists, who, rather like the Hutus, find the work fulfilling. Sudan’s 21-year, two million-victims civil war wasn’t waged by atheists either. And in northern Uganda “the Lord’s Resistance Army” has spent two decades turning children into monsters. Joseph Kony, its sadistic, child-raping leader, communes with the Holy Spirit; his political platform is the Ten Commandments. While true, it is beside the point that he makes a mockery of Christian doctrine. The point is his well-documented innocence of atheism — and of little else.

In Algeria a few years ago, some 70,000 civilians were slaughtered by insurgents of the kind that enjoys playing football with human heads. If these gentlemen were atheists, it is news to me.

Tony Blair, a passionate Evangelical who sees everything as a struggle against wickedness, thinks God will judge his effort to throw Iraq into civil war; and presumably, give it rave reviews. His American partner in war crime was born again with televangelist Billy Graham as a busy midwife. Graham, whom Bill Clinton has called “the man I love,” prayed with US Presidents before just about every commencement of hostilities from Vietnam to Iraq and will surely do so again when God instructs Bush the Lesser to smite Iran.

Ah yes, Iran. This safely non-atheist country — the only one besides the Vatican to be run by clergy — executes sexually active 16 year old girls and homosexuals by slow asphyxiation. As Pascal, who lived through the most horrific wars of religion in Europe, observed: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” I recently forced myself to watch this movie of a stoning to death in the mullah’s paradise. Swaying back and forth in agony, the victims’ heads are mashed into bloody pulp to enthusiastic cries of Allahu akbar (”God is greater”). Well, if an allmighty sky-god exists — which I doubt even more after watching this savagery — I should hope he is greater than that.

Thirty years ago today there was a military coup in Argentina, upon which at least 10,000 people were murdered, often after rape and torture. Not noted for their atheism, the coupmakers spent most of the preceding day with Argentina’s leading bishops, who gave their blessings. And though some priests later joined the resistance, the Church condoned the regime, as it had those of Mussolini and Franco.

Of course, none of this suggests that moral behavior necessarily goes with the absence of belief in deities. The two most prolific mass murderers of all time, Stalin and Mao — probably also Hitler, the bronze medal winner — are enough to invalidate that notion.

It does suggest, however, that indulgence in revealed religion is pretty useless as a bulwark against evil. The bigots among the believers, then, can take their smug condemnation of us godless people and stick it.

Update: My favorite blogger, Digby, tackles the subject here and here.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

From my local paper, for aficionados of the absurd. “Enjoy” — this might be the last time in Europe.

— I heard him swear out loud, says the clean-shaven man in black standing in the middle of the floor. The courtroom is tiny with barely enough room for the judge, the defendant, his attorney and an audience of seven.

— Did you see him getting off the bus? the defender queries.

— No, but I heard the swearing, says the policeman.

— How can you be sure it was Dynko that sweared? Surely a lot of people were getting off the bus?

— Yes… Ehh… I recognized his voice.

PEN employee also sentenced

Barely an hour later, the author and office manager of the Belarussian PEN Club, Irina Darafeichuk, is escorted out to the prisoner transportation awaiting at the backdoor. She is also alleged to have sweared.

— Seven days. It’s madness, she has time to say.

It is a crime in Belarus to use especially profane words. The defender Darina Hulata would like to know what the editor actually said.

— I will not allow that question, judge Jelena Krajchik cuts her off.

— Surely we should get to hear what he is in fact accused of? Perhaps it wasn’t so foul?

— This is a court of law. It’s a crime to swear in court. I will not allow it, says the judge.

And so it continues in Room 42 in the courthouse of the Savietski district in Minsk. The two police witnesses give widely divergent versions of how the 32 year old was arrested, nor are they able to specify whether the swearing was in Belarussian or Russian. Two of the four witnesses for the defense, who are all prepared to take oaths that the editor said nothing profane, are refused testimony.

Impossible to survey  

In any case it doesn’t matter much. Everyone in the courtroom knows the real reason why the editor is standing trial: he was on his way to support the protesters at October Square, and besides he runs a small independent weekly — Nasha Niva — which the regime has long since banned both from news stands and public distribution.

President Aleksander Lukasjenko has chosen a sophisticated strategy for quelling the demonstrations in downtown Minsk: people are arrested arbitrarily underway to or from the square, quietly and well away from the cameras. Then they are prosecuted, either for taking part in illegal demonstrations or for foul language. The trials are dispersed among many different courthouses — the number and schedule are difficult to survey.

Bergens Tidende was the only foreign press at Dynko’s trial on Wednesday. When the party chair Anatolij Lebedko was sentenced the day before, we were joined by a Georgian colleague.

Allows the camp to stand

The editor Dynko is in tears as he stands between stern policemen in the hall, awaiting his verdict.

— Lukasjenko could have cleared October Square in minutes. Instead he shows the world that the tent camp is allowed to stand. But everyone knows that it is dangerous to go there. And when all the foreign reporters have gone home, he will take what is left of the camp, Dynko says.

A prison sentence on the record can be devastating for one’s studies or career. Noone knows how many are jailed in all — the opposition believes it is close to two hundred.

Dynko gets ten days. Waiting outside in the bluewhite prisoner bus are today’s nine other convicts from the Savietski district. Dynko gives the V-sign to his wife and friends, who have come to see him. Then the police drives off with ten political prisoners.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

In strangely underreported developments, another part of Africa’s largest country may soon be thrown into war.

Besides killing some 2,4 million, the deadly conflicts of south Sudan and western Sudan (Darfur) have spawned more than one fifth of the world’s nearly 24 million internally displaced people, a fresh study finds. The Darfur situation, without question a slo-mo genocide, threatens to become “a perfect storm of human destruction.” There are signs now that this may repeat itself in the east, which has many of the ingredients of previous conflicts. These include claims of political marginalization and economic neglect; competition for water and land; and religious and ethnic differences exacerbated by racism.

If this seems complicated, it is. But as with both Darfur and the 21-year war in south Sudan, one can safely put the brunt of the blame on the vicious Islamistic military junta in Khartoum, which has long since proven its credentials as perhaps the most evil regime on earth (and I don’t use such terms lightly). If ever UN sanctions were called for, they are so here. But obviously, nothing will happen with the oil-gobbling China and the arms-peddling Russia as veto powers and the other permanent members on the fence. And so the world turns.

To mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has launched events worldwide. The poster chosen is this:

To link such a slogan with a famous Danish invention suspiciously resembles, well, an ethnic slur.

Racism takes many shapes, indeed.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

The Balkans region has a penchant for producing more history than it can consume. ~ Winston Churchill

Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation. ~ Ernest Renan

The Serbian province — and UN protectorate — informally known as Kosovo is a fertile, mountain-ringed area of 10.887 km². It subdivides into the valleys of Kosovo proper and Metohija (Greek for ‘monastic land’): indeed, its full name, as Serbs often like to point out, is ‘Kosovo and Metohija’. Below, ‘Kosovo’ refers to the entire area unless otherwise noted.

The ancient history of the region is fairly obscure. Suffice it to say that, conquered by Alexander the Great 300 years B.C.E., it became part of the Roman province of Dardania in the 4th century A.D. and thus belonged to the Byzantine empire when the Serbs arrived in the Balkans about two centuries later. Fast forward to…

1189 In this year, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa passed through on his way to the Third Crusade. Stefan Nemanjić, ruler of the small Serbian principality of Rascia, met with him and signed a trade agreement. Barbarossa drowned underway to Jerusalem, but Nemanjić used the mayhem of the time to carve out a kingdom. One of his sons was crowned; another founded the Serbian Orthodox Church and secured it autocephalous status. As proven today by some 1,300 monasteries and churches, Kosovo was the cultural, political, and economic heartland of this advanced medieval state.

The Kingdom of Serbia flourished between the demise of the Byzantines, from whom it emerged, and the rise of the Ottomans, to whom it fell prey. This Golden Age spanned less than two centuries, culminating with Tzar Stefan Dušan the Powerful, who doubled his empire until it stretched from the Danube to the Peloponnes and encompassed present-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, northern Greece, and Bulgaria. When Dušan died en route to seizing Constantinople in 1355, it dissolved into squabbling fiefdoms.

By then, the Ottoman Sultanate had embarked on a formidable campaign of conquest. In 1371 it vanquished a Christian army in modern Bulgaria, wiping out the chief contenders for the Serbian throne. Militarily, this spat was far more important than the one to follow in 1389; the same can be said of the final Serbian loss on the Danube in 1459. In terms of mythic significance, however, it is the other way around: “In all of European history,” notes Tim Judah in The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, “it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche.” (30). By way of attempts, the Battle of Kosovo has been likened to Hastings, Bastogne, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Fall of Troy — combined.

1389 On St. Vitus Day, June 28, 1389, at a desolate plain near Priština, a scrambled Christian alliance of Serbs and Bosnians faced its foe. Its commander was a minor Serb nobleman, a certain Prince Lazar; his Ottoman counterpart being the Sultan, Murad I. Neither man survived the day. And though the Turks gained the most in relative terms, the battle itself was apparently a tie which mostly pleased the blackbirds feasting on the tens of thousands of slain. This gave the region its name: Kosovo Polje means ‘the Field of Blackbirds’.

But legend has painted the draw as a Serbian disaster, and elevated the defeat, in turn, to a moral triumph. As was Ottoman practice, the Sultan had offered Prince Lazar a choice between vassalage and war. Après la lutte — likely in order to boost morale as well as the interests of Lazar’s heir — the Serbian Church cast the decision to fight as an affirmation of moral purity over worldly gain. According to this hagiography, God made Lazar choose between victory and temporal power, or death and an eternal Kingdom of Heaven. “And the emperor chose the empire of heaven above the empire of the earth,” one poem, “The Downfall of the Serbian Empire,” declares.

Lovingly embellished over the centuries, this story evolved into a veritable Passion. For example, a 16th century interpolation involves a Last Supper, as well as a Judas figure represented by Vuk Branković, one of Lazar’s favorite knights, who supposedly withdrew at a critical stage in the battle. Taken to extremes, the myth suggests that St. Lazar’s “martyrdom” absolved the Serbs of the sins by which their state had perished, making them in effect a “new Israel.” So, in the fullness of time, they shall be restored even their earthly kingdom.

In the present, however, Serbia was duly conquered by 1459 and would remain so for centuries. Killing or expelling most of the nobility, the Ottomans imposed shari’a laws reducing Christians to second-class citizenry. This included a poll tax (jizya), legal discrimination, and worst of all, devshirme: the dreaded “blood tribute” of perhaps a thousand male children per annum, to be converted to Islam and enrolled in the imperial apparatus. While these were better terms than those offered Muslims by Christian rulers of the age — notably in Spain upon the Reconquista — that obviously did little to console the Serbs. The most hardcore fled to the mountains of Montenegro, the only semi-independent Balkan state. There the monks would carry forth the martyr cult of Kosovo Polje, while by the flickering bonfires, village bards sang of Prince Lazar.

In the meantime, another ethnic group was moving down from the highlands. The people now known as Albanians began settling in the lowlands. These were fiercely clannish pastoralists of disputed ancestry, who are thought (though all such questions are controversial) to have been a minority in the Serbian Kingdom. Having neither a Church of their own nor the memory of statehood, the proto-Albanians proved more susceptible than Serbs to conversion and its rewards. An estimated two-thirds took up Islam. And from their ranks sprang the new feudal lords of Kosovo; a mainstay of Serb resentment ever since.

1689 The demographic shift came to a head after the failed second siege of Vienna. When the Turks repelled an Austrian invasion in 1689, Serb peasants, who had risen to support it, fled the harsh retaliations. In 1690 the Archbishop of Peć, whose monastery the Ottomans had destroyed, led 30,000-40,000 families across the Danube to the Austrian military frontier, the area now called Vojvodina.

This “Great Migration” — another paradoxically celebrated event, which in the Serbian national consciousness evokes the Exodus — moved the center of Serb culture to the Belgrade region, where it has since remained. This rendered Kosovo underpopulated, causing a Turk-sponsored influx of Muslims from present-day Albania. Along with not necessarily voluntary mass conversions among remaining Serbs, many of whom came in time to adopt Albanian customs and even language, this produced an ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo that has also endured to this day. Such, at any rate, is the simple version of a complex tale. Fast forward two centuries…

1889 By now the tide of power was turning on the Balkans. With the declining Ottoman Sultanate on the verge of bankruptcy, Serbia had resurfaced as a principality after a revolutionary war (1804-14) and under the auspices of the Turks’ most vehement enemy, Russia. At the 1878 Berlin Conference it had won recognition as a sovereign state, as did Montenegro. The Serbian Kingdom was back on the map; and its gaze became fixed on its historical heartland.

In Belgrade a nascent bourgeoise had discovered the epic cycles of Kosovo Polje, which had drifted north from Montenegro and were published in national-romantic fashion. (They attracted international admiration: Alexander Pushkin and Jacob Grimm cherished the poems, and Goethe, who taught himself Serbo-Croatian in order to read them, compared them to The Illiad.) As with nation-building in general, a literate high culture was constructed from folk traditions in a manner glorifying a distant past. What is unique here is the status assigned the fictionalized events of a non-decisive battle half a millennium back. In a rousing opening address to the nation-wide, months-long celebration of the 500th anniversary of this slaughter, Serbia’s minister of foreign affairs intoned:

On St. Vitus’ day, June 28 1889, 30,000 pilgrims paid homage to St. Lazar’s bones in Hungary.

In due course, the national myth was pressed into service for a Greater Serbia. Set in motion by ambitious politicians and sustained by a wave of yearning for the Golden Age, an irredentist project gained momentum: the “historic mission” of “liberating Old Serbia.” Thus, in the chaotic First Balkan War of 1912, Serbian troops advanced on Kosovo, whose defense the retreating Turks had left to the Albanian aristocracy. After centuries of tense but seldom violent co-habitation, Serbs and Albanians clashed for the first time in large-scale battle. Here is how one typical young enlistee responded to his southward deployment:

That year the Serbian army, trailed by thousands of peasant settlers and wreaking much havoc, conquered Kosovo proper in the face of stiff Albanian resistance. The next year the international community recognized the area as Serbian, with Montenegro getting sovereignty over Metohija.

Famously, however, on June 28 1914 another young Serb nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip was outraged that Bosnia remained a Habsburg province, and especially, that the prince had picked St. Vitus Day to oversee military manoeuvres on the Serbian border. He was also inspired by a mythical incident in the Battle of Kosovo, wherein a Serb nobleman, Miloš Obilić, infiltrated the enemy in the guise of a deserter and plunged a poisoned dagger into the Sultan. In any case, his wrath lit the fuse of World War I; an unprecedented carnage which would cost Serbia an incredible sixty percent of its fighting-age male population.

In Kosovo proper, a fierce guerrilla war ensued between Serbs and Albanians, before Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian invaders crushed the Serbian army there and forced what is — characteristically — known as the “Great Serbian retreat” across Kosovo and over the Albanian mountains to a refuge on the island of Korfu. Constantly harried by insurgents, this hapless winter march claimed as many as 100,000 Serbian lives. (It is remembered in Serbia as the nation’s “Albanian Golgotha.”) However, by 1918, as the Dual Monarchy lost out to the French, the Serbian army inflicted a terrible revenge replete with massacres and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile Serbia received accolades in the West. In June 1918, for example, the United States recognized St. Vitus Day as a day of special commemoration.

The colonization continued after Serbia joined the pan-Slavic monarchy later to be named Yugoslavia. Throughout the interwar period, the Belgrade government deported Albanians from Kosovo proper and resettled half the arable land, spawning a big Serb majority by the late 1920s. (More on this project and its ideology can be found in an official memorandum from 1937 called The expulsion of the Albanians.) But during World War II the tide turned again, with most of Kosovo incorporated into an Italian-controlled “Greater Albania.” Nearly 100,000 Serbs were expelled, and up to 10,000 killed, by Albanian militias allied to the fascists.

It was hoped that the country’s post-war reincarnation as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) under the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito would end this inter-ethnic bloodfeud. And after a final uprooting of the Albanian resistance, killing up to 48,000 in six months, it did for a while. The province of Kosovo enjoyed decades of relative tranquility wherein nationalism of every kind was suppressed with extreme prejudice by the equal-opportunity dictator and his secret police.

During this respite, a demographic bomb went off. Rural Albanians, plagued by poverty and low education levels, had the highest birth rate in Europe, making the population virtually explode. By 1961, Albanians accounted for 67%, Serbs for 27%, and others for 6%. This new situation on the ground, combined with frustration at the underdevelopment that propelled it, led Kosovo Albanians to riot for independence in the 1968 student revolts.

The pragmatic Tito responded by revamping the consitution in 1974, granting Kosovo (as well as the Vojvoidina province with its big Hungarian minority) effective self-government. Besides vast financial transfers from the center, Kosovo gained a seat on the federal presidency; a legislature; a supreme court; a university; a central bank; a police force; and a quota system ensuring Albanian dominance of all these institutions. But much as this displeased the Serbs, it also thwarted a growing Albanian demand for full Republic status, which carried the theoretical right to secede. A year after Tito’s death in 1980 — at which point 77% of the population were ethnic Albanians — near-revolutionary riots flared up anew. This time they were quelled with tanks.

Meanwhile there were now persistent claims of harassment and discrimination of non-Albanians. The complaints had considerable merit, as the thousands of Serbs fleeing Kosovo every year would readily confirm. It is equally true, however, that they were wildly exaggerated by Serb nationalists. In 1986, Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke of genocide in progress, as did 216 prominent Serbian intellectuals who decried “the physical, political, legal and cultural genocide” against the Serbs.

Then, a much-reported turning point occurred. In April 1987, the deputy president of the Serbian communist party, Slobodan Milošević, arrived at Kosovo Polje — by now a suburb of Priština — to mediate the simmering conflict. As he met with local Serbs, a crowd of nationalist Serbs outside the building began pelting stones at the (predominantly Albanian) police, who struck back with batons. As Milošević ventured outside to see what was happening, an elderly man approached him begging for help against “separatist police beating women and children.” The former retreated to a second-floor balcony and declared, while gesturing toward the Field of Blackbirds: “Noone shall be allowed to beat you again!” The crowd responded with chants of “Slobo, Slobo.”

This incident, which rebel leaders have proudly confessed to instigating — possibly in collusion with Milošević, who had met with some of them four days beforehand — was televised in all four corners of Serbia. It served as a firebrand for nationalist emotion. Transformed overnight from grey apparatchik to national hero, Milošević proceeded to wrest control of the communist party from Ivan Stambolić, his friend and benefactor for a quarter century. Stambolić, who in 2000 was assassinated on the eve of the Presidential election by eight Serbian secret police officers loyal to Milošević, has said he had seen that day at Kosovo Polje as the end of Yugoslavia.

While that may be an overstatement, certainly two basic taboos of the federation had been flaunted: on mass rallies and ethnic identity politics, respectively. Milošević, supported by hard-liners from Kosovo, followed up with more than sixty so-called “meetings of truth” on the Kosovo question across the length and width of Serbia. These mass rallies he deftly used to overthrow the provincial leaderships of Kosovo and Vojvoidina. At a November 1988 meeting in Belgrade, under the parole of “Brotherhood and Unity,” he thundered to a million listeners:

In grand demagogic style, he envisioned a new:

To be continued.

Update: Part II here.

I remember stumbling upon, as a kid, The Book of Job in a family bible. Set in archaic language and almost indecipherable gothic font, it was a struggle to get through; but the story was absorbing and the poetry, otherworldly. Like countless readers before me, however, I was baffled by the ending.

Years later, the existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) helped me make sense of it at last. His classic essay on The Book of Job is adapted from his masterpiece, On the Tragic, published in 1941 under German occupation. It is a subversive and blasphemous reading of this ancient meditation on the Problem of Evil, which Zapffe understood as an indictment of the human condition. The final paragraph never fails to send a chill down my spine. As promised to a commenter a while ago, I have attempted to render the essay; presumably for the first time in English.

My previous translations of Zapffe are here, here and here. As before, I have chosen British spelling. The prose is extraordinary and I have no illusions of having done it justice.

But then, where is justice found in this world?

The problem of interpreting a text that is either difficult to make particular sense of, or else allows more than one reading, is in theory the same for a work of today and one of bygone times. Only factually does there tend to be a difference — in the access to means and material. The interpretation may be determined by its causae, its effective causes; such is the case when the interpreter by means of historical and biographical knowledge seeks to present the author’s supposed intentions, or reconstruct the contemporary reception. But it may also be determined by its telos; such is the case when the interpreter asks, How does the text affect a reader of today — what does it yield when studied in terms of our present-day preconceptions?
     In the case of The Book of Job, we lack direct knowledge of the `author intention’ or the attitudes of the recipients upon its `publication’. Schück places the poet in Alexandria in the 4th century B.C.E., suggesting that he, in the context of an ancient myth, voiced his own heartfelt views on the philosophy of religion. Theodicé, the `defence of God’ as opposed to `criticism of the world order’, gained burning relevance as Judaism and Hellenism clashed in the minds. Both causae and telos are thus at play in the following interpretation.

Job is a kindred spirit of Prometheus; they both suffer godly malice and appeal to the principle of justice. Furthermore, a network of historical arteries is believed to link Aischylos’ play to the form given The Book of Job in canonical Scripture.
     The textual history is interesting — with the `traditional book’ as the source and servile theologians carrying a train of piety along. Together they frame a gem of world literature. It is a man of deeply personal acquaintance with pain, tremendous passion, and a reason of incisive clarity who meets us here, a thinker with a fanatic will to intellectual honesty and a poet of soaring cosmic pathos to match his flair for bestowing a blinding satirical form upon his abysmal hate of the god. There is a golden irony in the destiny of the writing: through the interpolations of the pious, this book of revolt, with all its smoking imprecations, has gained a place among the rocks of faith upon which people build their metaphysical consolation even today.
     The poet takes as his point of departure the tradition that Job was great in the eyes of his tribesmen in terms of religion, status, and wealth. He was `blameless and upright, one who feared God, and turned away from evil’, and self-effacingly helpful too. He was the greatest of all the people of the East, happy and highly esteemed by young as well as old, poor as well as rich. There is none like him on the earth — so says the Lord himself. In other words: Job is perched at the pinnacle of his society’s culture, and just those rare and fine qualities that placed him there become in turn the direct cause of his destruction, of his biological, social and metaphysical ruin. He is to be a bone of contention among the powerful; a victim, in a sense, of an inverted `envy of the gods’.
     For the Lord brags to Satan about his servant Job — what must not I be like, who am feared by a man like Job, and Satan replies: Hah! Job worships you merely in tribute to your patronage. Now deprive him of his assets, and we shall see. Jahve agrees to the bet, and soon Job is struck by two fearsome floodwaves of disaster until his life is barely left him. God wants to show his adversary that Job serves and fears him (love is not at issue here) whether blessings or curses are sent, simply for `God’s own sake’ — however that is supposed to be motivated. Job has to prostrate himself unconditionally, humbly conceding — what? God’s might or God’s right? Well, that is precisely the burning question in what follows.
     And Job really bows, as he has been taught is the right thing to do, during both of his ordeals. In the traditional book he is also promptly rewarded, but this is where the poet enters to request a place for human nature in Job. And the human is more than a docile slave to his image of the god; he brims with earthly life and élan. So Job gives God what is God’s due, but like Jeremiah, he curses the day he was born. It is better to be dead than to lead a life like this; still better, to never be born. Why does God force those to live who do not wish to do so?

These thoughts provoke an outpouring of eloquence from the `friends’ Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. It is in reply to their more or less unthinking dogmatic cant that Job is to make an accusation of timeless dimensions, attaining a voice that concentrates all of humankind’s prayers and threats, laments, hopes, and curses into a few immortal verses. Above the vital biological interests of the people and humanity, whose assurance was hitherto the only purpose of the pact with Jahve, the poet now elevates a new interest: The Book of Job is a drama about the emergence of culture; a depiction of a spiritual `mutation’ comparable to Prometheus, The Eumenides, and Grillparzer’s Libussa. One can perceive a new metaphysical consciousness crystallise under the maximal pressure of agony — a consciousness of the fundamental conflict between the god (or by analogy, natural forces) as the environment’s master, and the sacred human demand for meaning in what happens.
    The friends’ traditional doctrine claims, with minor variations, that God rewards the righteous (law-abiding) and punishes the ungodly (law-infringing) in this life — a creed that Job too has grown up with. As Job is now `unpunishable’, says the old Eliphaz, God will certainly deliver him from agony if only he endures in patience while recognising God’s rightfulness in doing all this to Job. No man is perfect to God, not even you, which is why you now suffer. But when the cup of suffering is full, you will be reestablished in your former bliss. During the ordeal you may cry out as much as you like; none can hear you. Be grateful for His scolding of you; it only proves that you are in His hand.

I may perhaps have made too much of it, Job meekly replies, but this I simply cannot take! I have no peace while I swallow my spittle; I am after all a human, not a mineral! And yet I will try to be humble, if only you explain my fault to me, the fault that earned me such a treatment. For it can hardly be my impatience now after the fact that brought down my misadventure! — Neither here nor later on is there any sign that Job equals himself with God in moral stature — the respective demands are also different, to put it mildly. Job is merely requesting a reasonable proportion of `punishment’ to imperfection, especially inasmuch as perfection is entirely beyond human reach. He must, given the central dogma, be free to compare his fate with those of others, and this is where he grows sceptical about the distribution of goods and ills. But his friends misjudge his zeal in pleading his innocence, suspecting a mad pride behind it: that Job regards himself as `absolutely’, not `relatively’, faultless. The source of Job’s fervour is another, however: it is for the sake of the problem, in the interest of clarity, that he reviews his conduct. He queries what they mean by sin when basing their defence of God on the doctrine of the sinner’s doom and the righteous person’s vindication. It is easy for you to preach, he concludes in his reply to Eliphaz, who have all your assets intact. My life is in tatters; I shall soon perish from this disease, and then there is no more. Those are different terms, indeed. And since I have no more to lose, nor anything to gain by keeping quiet, I might at least indulge in lamenting my plight.
     And now he directs his words straight at his, and his friends’, God. What is the point of all this? Do you find me a worthy object of your destructive power? Have you no better things to do? Do you not think you lessen yourself by going on like this? Mightn’t you stop while I am still alive and grant me a moment’s peace - for when I shortly die, you must, after all, stop anyway!
     The young Bildad then repeats Eliphaz’ claim, applying it to Job’s sons. They must surely have sinned egregiously who were so swiftly slain, for God’s justice cannot be doubted.
     True enough, Job ponderously replies; it is futile for a human to challenge God. But now the critical breakthrough occurs in Job’s thought: How so? Is it because we are so feeble in our sense of justice that we should bow our heads in shame if God the Lord were to explain to us the least of his motives? No, he infers with desperate rigour, it must rather be due to his overwhelming power relative to ours, his greatness in meters and kilos, that we cannot prevail against him. Our rightness or wrongness in the human sense makes no difference whatsover. It is immaterial twice over: firstly, he cannot be summoned for negotiations; he is invisible, exempt from our limitations, has no need for our facilities, and does not communicate with us as we do among ourselves. And secondly: even if he did arrive for negotiations — what good would it do? No umpire could arbitrate between us; he does not accept to be bound by even one explicit principle of justice. He is an absolute autocrat by virtue of his strength and knowledge; mercy I may appeal for, but no justice. Indeed, he can render the innocent guilty, twisting the sense of justice in his chest and forcing him to convict himself. Let him make us equal before the law, and I will answer him. As long as he keeps me on the rack, standing above me as an executioner, there is no basis for negotiation. Accordingly, even an indictment from God would be invaluable.

But surely there is at least a meaning in the misery, even if at odds with the idea of justice? Let me know then why you harass me! I am, after all, your own creation wholly; in the name of reason you must have a motive for destroying it. The call for comprehension erupts like a flame toward the heavens; Job is hammering God’s ear in hope of striking a humanly related cord. If you probe my sin and delinquency, there must at least be a chance of contact on a single point; one common principle must apply to your judgment and mine. If there is any truth in your claim to have made us in your image, then something must be commensurable in our respective views and verdicts, and this must also pertain to my sense of justice, which you created together with the rest. For if the god’s understanding of justice deviates from humanity’s, then it is as good as arbitrary for us; then our last chance is lost, there is no pathway of hope through perfectibility, we are surrendered to a metaphysical sweepstake, and there is no longer any guarantee that our highest virtues, faithfulness, humility and benevolence, are not in fact the broad path to damnation. But then, if his notion of justice deviates from ours, we will no more use the word `justice’ of his dispositions. Nor will we condone the fraud inherent in the theodicé of the pious: calling an act the most heinous crime and irredeemable offence when performed by a human, but inscrutable love when by God. It is one out of two: same law and same verdict for both, or different laws and verdicts. If we are to accept the governance of our world as just, says Job, it has to be just in the human sense. Otherwise God can be as `just’ as he likes in his own language, but in ours it is called unjust.

The same consideration applies to experience, Job affirms. When I see that a man is a crook, and he nonetheless, or precisely therefore, fares jolly well, the apologist cannot claim that he fares badly without giving a wholly new sense to the words. If he now pretends to use them in their ordinary senses, he is being dishonest in logical terms. So when Zophar, on God’s behalf, repeats the hackneyed dogma that virtue shall be rewarded, and so on, Job is seized by the ruthlessness of battle. He takes on the creed of his friends (or foes), exposing it as nonsense by the standards of reason and experience — the only ones we may decently apply. After all, even animals can sense their subordination to forces that have nil to do with good and right, and as for the human world, injustice is rather the prevailing principle. The human condition is dreadful from the vantage point of death. You should not go so far to save your illusory grounds of consolation as to defend God by pure deceit. If someone can convince me, I will concede, but not to manifest folly. Nor will I yield to the talk of God’s mysterious ways, for if I cannot form an image of him, neither can you; then we all stagger blind about.

Bildad’s second entry introduces a new element: Of what significance are you, and your demand for justice, to the entire worldly household? This is the Stoic philosophy; it sits uneasily with the principle of retribution, but Bildad ties them together with a well-known apologetic trick: to connect the incompatible items with a `nonetheless’. Job takes no solace in the fundamental unimportance of his fate; he has no use for a world-scheme where humans play no part. The call for meaning erupts in him more insistently than ever; against Stoicism he demands that his destiny (i.e. all people’s) be graven into the legend of the universe with everlasting letters. And his challenging thought proceeds to a higher authority than the god he was taught about but is dismissing, to one whose interests connect with the most sacred of human needs. Job has risen high above his individual pain and is speaking on behalf of all humanity; his sense of justice is incorruptible, ascending in merciless majesty from his despair. He even rejects the clause that the evil of `ungodly’ ancestors be visited upon descendants, for any `punishment’ must befall the delinquent in the flesh.

But now Bildad comes along with his last bullet: God’s greatness of quantity; if sitting in the entire colloquium, he has either failed to understand a thing or refused to do so. As Job lacks the Lord’s astronomic dimensions, he should not try to prevail. Baffled by the argument, Job asks: With whose help have you uttered words, and whose spirit has come forth from you? Being only too acquainted with this aspect of the Lord’s exertions, Job schools Bildad in the sublime poetic art of extolling the many mechanistic wonders that we cannot copy. But then — Job ominously concludes — that also circumscribes his powers; he can storm and roar as much as he likes, that does not help one iota in the matter at hand. On the contrary: the Lord abused his might to violate my right. At this point I must stand firm, for I cannot betray my conviction without harm to my soul. And I do not shy from calling any cosmic force ungodly that strays from the rightful path. If Job’s expression `my enemy’ refers to Jahve, as the context suggests, then he here puts forth a novel theology: the notion `divine’ shall not conform to `the god that be’; rather, the god we can accept shall conform to the norm of divinity — to our conception of the ideal god by the token of humanity. And so we require the god to embody the highest wisdom, shooting all creation through with order and meaning. Where, then, is the well-spring of wisdom, inquires Job — where is the source of spirit that animates god and human alike? Jahve is obviously not this source, though he alone knows the origin of spiritual power. And to what end has he put it himself? To wreak havoc with wind and rain and lightning, playing war games on humanity. `Fear Me and depart from evil’ — that was all he got out of it.

A later author finds no way to save the three reproachful friends. Job has torched every imaginable argument — yet cannot in all decency be ceded the dispute without further ado. Thus he adds a fifth character, Elihu, who is previously unmentioned and supposed to speak the timely words to satisfy the demands of both faith and experience. However, despite notable pretensions, he is able only to rehash and vary what has already been said. It must therefore mystify the reader that the Lord, when the Day of Reckoning arrives, does not rebuke him for heresy together with the other three. Even more surprising is it, though, that he hauls them over the coals after repeating the gist of their lectures himself. But we are only mystified because we still retain some notions about the divine logic. After the Lord has made his personal introduction, there shall be nothing more to surprise us.
     For this speech of God must be one of the most marvellous passages in the whole of canonical Scripture. Job, for one, is clearly perplexed by the rich demonstration of all that is weird and wonderful in nature.
    And when the Lord expectantly prompts his reply, Job says rather quietly: You know what I think of my misery. These zoological conjuring tricks hardly concern our differences. What else do you want me to say?
     So the Lord is compelled, however reluctantly, to address the question of justice. (God was careless enough to show up on the scene; he cannot pull out now without loss of prestige. And in prestige, vanity, is perhaps the deepest motivation for this god’s benighted rule.) How dare you allege that I am unjust?? asks the Lord in the whirlwind. Do you not see my strength and do you not hear how terribly I can roar? Prove that you have my might, and I will bow to recognise your right. Only might carries weight in my eyes. Do you know what is the apex of my creation? Not the human spirit with its sickly sense of justice, as you fool believe, no the hippo sir! Its legs are copper pipes and its bones like iron rods! A far cry from you effeminate whimp with all your tender sensibilities. Now maybe you think Man is second to the hippo? Oh far from it, the crocodile is its only equal. It has armor plates, that one, but what have you? Aye, you are quite someone to lecture me about justice!

One can imagine Job’s boundless consternation at this tangible appearance of Jahve. Here Job has been attributing to his problem the profoundest, most crucial significance of principle — assuming himself faced with an adversary who should convince him to the point of mortal shame as soon as his tongue touched the burning questions — a god so dignified and sacred and pure that even his indictment must cause exultation! And now he is met with a grotesquely primitive world-ruler, a cosmic caveman, a blustering braggart, almost endearing in his utter ignorance of spiritual culture. Job also readily realizes that it would be laughably naïve to raise theoretical questions here; to assert a persuasion requires an adversary who is equipped to comprehend it and to see the argument as common ground. Nothing could be more misplaced than to beat his chest in a display of moral heroism until Jahve puts his paw down to squash him like a flea. He might as well take his high-minded stands vis-a-vis the hippo and the crocodile, who much more than Job are created in the Lord’s image. The situation is utterly transformed now that Jahve has made the mistake of revealing his true nature and no longer benefits from the idealising human imagination. `I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes’. Job is paying lipservice to God as one does to the mentally unbalanced. His battle with God was based upon a false premise. What is news to Job is not God’s greatness of quantity, which he fully knew beforehand. It is the poorness of quality. His loftiest belief, his conception of the god, has taken a fatal blow. To this inane ur-force, Job can yield without the slightest shame, since the `battle’ left his principled stance untouched. A spiritual force may be annihilated, but not `defeated’, by the annihilitation of its corporal vehicle. Not even corporally is Job `defeated’, for in that area he did not fight. He is unpersuaded of having erred about the justice of the worldly order; on the contrary, his views are borne out. By so capitulating, he deals the tyrant the most damning insult there is: that the adversary does not even merit a fight.

One who does not smell a rat is Jahve: thrilled as a child by his `triumph’, he initiates a grand reconciliation. The poor friends, who thought they had served their master diligently, adhering to the law that has just been confirmed by personal revelation, and even foretelling the reconciliation itself — those are harshly dealt with, while Job, who has still not recovered from his initial shocks, sees the return and doubling of his chattel and wealth. He gets as many sons and daughters as were crushed in the beginning — it is clearly the Lord’s opinion that no harm is done as long as the number is preserved. What an unflattering light does not fall on this godly Caliban, who believes he can make it all up with money and cattle when Job has put his finger on the rotten rub in the very world machinery!
     Thus ends this grand metaphysical confrontation in blind comedy. Job keeps wisely quiet in his newfound bliss, but he shall hardly forget the glimpse that he, in his time of terror, caught behind the scenes of creation, even as he grows to be 140 years old and full of days.
     Has Satan lost his bet? If he is of Jahve’s caliber, he has. But if he is a clever Mefisto, then he and Job now share a little secret. Within, Satan achieved a victory far more precious than one without: the colossus has exposed his weak spot, allowing his arch-enemy a grip on the human mind previously unthinkable. God missed the scope of Job’s test; a ruler’s whim during merry recreation has turned into a deadly serious affair.

Job’s tragedy is, in the first regard, the outer one that he is broken along with his household for being the most praiseworthy person in the land. But here the causal chain is ascribed to a Prolog im Himmel and cannot be tied to known earthly conditions. True, wealth might attract robbers, but storms and leprosy are accidents in the light of experience. So this tragedy is rather bereft of philosophical substance.
     All the weightier is the inner tragedy. Firstly, his sense of justice (the new greatness evoked by the outer tragedy), unique to Job within his circle and his finest quality in the eyes of the modern reader, brings him melancholy and Weltschmertz, the severest of mental anguish. Secondly, Job’s vivid imagination and noble spirit render him especially prone to such anguish — he is dismayed when the Almighty gives him `the visions of the night’. Shallow natures are spared such deep Hamletian vistas, and the `ungodly’ have no analogous problem of justice. This dilemma concerns us all the more for being somehow `eternally human’.
     But the god in The Book of Job — does he concern us? Is there anything more to it than poetic play with a conception of god now exotic and obsolete? Do we know this god? Indeed, we do from the history of religion; he is the god of the Old Testament, the god of wars, armies and divisions, the jealous, or as we would say, the harsh and vigilant Jehova. But does he only dwell in the history of religion? We are hardly so fortunate: he holds sway in experience as well, today as 2,400 years ago. He represents a familiar social and biological environment: the blind forces of nature oblivious to the human craving for order and meaning, the unpredictable strikes of disease and death, the ephemerality of fame, the betrayal of friends and kin. He is the god of machines and might, of rule by violence, Moscow tribunals, party yoke and conquest, of copper pipes and armor plates. Job is not alone to confront him with weapons of the spirit. Some are trampled underfoot in heroic martyrdom; others see the limitation even of martyrdom — they bow in outer things, but hide despair in their hearts.