The Economist - USA (2020-02-01)

The EconomistFebruary 1st 2020 Books & arts 73

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tume designer, dressed Faye Dunaway in

vintage silk stockings from Paris, hoping

that “they would tell [her] body something

about the character and bleed their way

into the performance.” Mr Polanski spent

40 minutes getting the perfect close-up of

an ant crawling over Mr Nicholson’s face

(“the costliest ant in human history”).

As Mr Wasson recounts, 1974 was a gold-

en year for Hollywood. Paramount received

a staggering 43 nominations for the Acad-

emy Awards, including 11 for “Chinatown”

(although only Mr Towne took home an

Oscar) and a best-picture award for “The

Godfather Part II”. But in retrospect, this

was the end of a cinematic heyday. More

and more, the industry became commer-

cially minded as film budgets swelled to

pay for rising promotional costs and rock-

eting salaries. For its creators, too, “China-

town” was a farewell. Evans soon lost his

career and reputation to cocaine; Mr Polan-

ski fled the consequences of his own

crimes against a teenage girl.

Outsiders “pretend to be interested in

how pictures are made”, F. Scott Fitzgerald

once observed, but “they never see the ven-

triloquist for the doll.” “The Big Goodbye” is

a captivating and revealing look at how the

magicians of cinema really work. 7

I

slamiccivilisationgotofftoarocky

start. Its first city, which lay in an arid

Arabian desert, excluded non-Muslims

and sentenced apostates to death. That in-

auspicious beginning makes the subse-

quent fecundity all the more startling.

Within decades, its great metropolises as-

pired to reproduce paradise on Earth. In

“Islamic Empires” Justin Marozzi, an Ara-

bic-speaking writer, encounters 15 of them,

one for each century of Islam’s history. His

book is a relief from the often downbeat

tone of literature about the region.

Damascus had a Christian majority

when it became Islam’s capital three de-

cades after the Prophet’s death in 632. Its

caliph, Muawiya, adopted many of the na-

tives’ ways. His treasurer, physician and fa-

vourite wife were all Christians; for a time

Greek and Pahlavi remained the official

languages. Leaders decorated their plea-

sure palaces with frescoes of bare-breasted

women and bacchanalian feasts. Baghdad,

founded in 762 and the world’s first circular

city, was even more dissolute. True, Harun

al-Rashid,itsgreatestcaliph,memorised

theKoran.Butthelifeheledwithhiscourt

poet,AbuNawas,wassoribaldthatdetrac-

torscalledhimcommanderoftheunfaith-

ful.Suchpermissivenessendured.TheOt-

toman sultan decriminalised homo-

sexualityin1858,a centurybeforeBritain.

These cities were as multinational,

multi-ethnic,multilingualandmulticul-

tural as the empires they ruled. When

Omar,thethirdSunnicaliph,conquered

Jerusalem, he cleaned up the Temple

Mount,whichChristianshadmadea dung

heaptosymboliseJewishdegradation,and

invitedJewsbacktopraywithMuslims.

TheArabicnameforthecity,Beital-Maq-

dis,wasadaptedfromthetemple’snamein

Hebrew,BeitHamikdash(“PlaceofHoli-

ness”). The pluralism set a precedent.

Whereas Christian conquerors expelled

Muslims and closed their mosques in

Spain,HungaryandGreece,Muslimover-

lordswelcomedotherfaiths.

UnderIslam,Cordobamayhavebeen

Europe’slargestcity(italsogavetheconti-

nentdeodorantandtoothpaste).Istanbul,

conqueredin1453,becametheseatofthe

Orthodoxpatriarchandchiefrabbiaswell

asofthecaliph(thoughHagiaSophia,a

Byzantinecathedral,becameamosque).

ShahAbbas’snewcapital,Isfahan,had 29

churchesandanArmeniancathedral.

Thisopenness,MrMarozzisays,made

Islamic citiesa “giantideas laboratory”.

Afterthearrivalofpaperintheeighthcen-

tury, they opened madrassas, or acade-

mies, with vast libraries. Qarawiyin,

foundedbya womanin 859 inthenorthAf-

rican city of Fez, is the world’s oldest

continually surviving academic institu-

tion.AccordingtoIbnTudela,a 12th-cen-

turyJewishvisitortoBaghdad,thecaliphof

theerareadHebrew.ThethirdMughalem-

peror, Akbar, launched a new universal

creed,completewithaninterfaiththink-

tank, the Ibadat Khana. Manicured parks

studded emerald cities on the edges of de-

serts. Cairo’s roof gardens bloomed with

orange groves. In the 16th century Babur

was known as the Gardener King after

planting ten parks in his city, Kabul.

As the threats from a resurgent West

mounted, however, some rulers turned in-

ward; the faithful grew defensive. Defeat

and intolerance went hand in hand. Sultan

Hossein, a shah of the Safavid dynasty, shut

Christians and Jews indoors when it rained

lest they contaminate Shias. He lost Isfa-

han to the Afghans in 1722 and was behead-

ed in his dazzling Hall of Mirrors. “Craters

had replaced flowerbeds,” reflects Mr Ma-

rozzi as he wanders through what had been

Kabul’s terraced gardens. “The heteroge-

neous has given way to the homogeneous.”

MrMarozziresiststheimpulsetosay

modernIslamhasrevertedtoitsharsh,in-

tolerantorigins.Withtheirfreetrade,mul-

tinationalpopulations,sybariticexcesses,

showpiecemuseumsandsoaringarchitec-

ture,hislasttwocities,DubaiandDoha,re-

callthoseoftheheydayhemourns.Theap-

petiteforhugesportsevents,suchasthe

football World Cup of 2022, testifies to

theirglobalambitions.Ifonlytheycould

alsorecoverIslam’sintellectualbuzz. 7

Bygone civilisations

Secret gardens

Islamic Empires. By Justin Marozzi. Pegasus

Books; 512 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £25

Babur the king

W

hen theSouthAfricangovernment

condemned J.M. Coetzee’s portrayal

of rape in “Disgrace” (1999) as racist, the

charge ignored the way the story is refract-

ed through the eyes of its central character,

a white university lecturer sacked over an

affair with a student. “Disgrace” was a #Me-

Too novel before its time, just as “Summer-

time” (2009), a book comprised of inter-

views with people who knew the late “John

Coetzee”, was a prototype of what has since

become known as “autofiction”. By the

time pseudo-autobiographical game-play-

ing had come into vogue, Mr Coetzee had

embarked on an enigmatic project whose

purpose is even harder to pin down.

His latest novel, “The Death of Jesus”,

completes a trilogy that began with “The

Childhood of Jesus” (2013). In that book,

middle-aged Simón meets a lost boy, Da-

vid, en route to a Spanish-speaking city

populated by refugees who, like them,

can’t remember who they are or where they

come from (the state assigns their names).

Enigmatic fiction

Ghost in the

machine

The Death of Jesus.By J.M. Coetzee.Harvill

Secker; 208 pages; £18.99. To be published in

America by Viking in May