The photographers who bring the war to our breakfast tables and living rooms are equally indebted to this native of Basra known in the West as Alhazen. He is the father of optics and the camera, and he is often called the first scientist.

His gifts to the world exceed the value of Iraq’s oil, and yet when we read of Iraq’s treasures being looted, the treasures he shared with the world are ignored because they were free, whereas thieves benefit from marketing objects. The intellectual squalor of this paradox should bring tears to our eyes, and yet it embarrasses no one.

Al Haitham is a son not only of Iraq, not only of Baghdad where he studied and worked, but of Spain, which under the Arabs was called Al Andalus, The Garden. He served three great Arab civilizations: the caliphate in Baghdad under the Abbasids, the caliphate in Cordoba under the Umayyads and the Cairo sultanate under the Fatimids. He served them and he prospered because of their enlightenment. He traveled widely in the Muslim world but came to spend the greatest part of his life in Fatimid Cairo.

Nothing that makes noisy headlines today is as important as Al Haitham’s achievements, not the war on terror, not the evil terrorists nor their fear-mongering adversaries, nor the oil. This son of Basra changed the world for the better because of his restless, penetrating mind. The voguish notion of flip-flopping that feeds the pundits would have been laughable to him, because as a scientist he understood that the mind must constantly adjust to discovery.

Al Haitham (965-1039) built the first camera obscura, foreshadowing modern photography. He carried out practical experiments in optics and explained them in his Book of Optics. He was the first man to use the term darkroom, Al-Bayt al-Muthlim in Arabic, and to build a darkroom. Explaining that light travels in time and with speed, he said: “If the hole was covered with a curtain and the curtain was taken off, the light traveling from the hole to the opposite wall will consume time.”

He reiterated this experiment when he established that light travels in straight lines. In his most revealing experiment, which produced the camera obscura, he studied the half-moon shape of the sun’s image during eclipses, which he observed on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters. In his famous essay On the Form of the Eclipse, Maqalah-fi-Surat-al-Kosuf in Arabic, he wrote, “The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle.”

Ibn al Haitham had a far-ranging mind. He made contributions to anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, opthalmology, philosophy, physics, psychology and scientific methodology. So influential was this polymath that he was often called in the West Ptolemaeus Secondus, the second Ptolemy. Indeed he challenged many of Ptolemy’s findings. His Book of Optics has been ranked alongside Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of the most influential books in the history of physics. A crater of the moon is named after Ibn al Haitham, which is not surprising, since more than half the stars in the heavens bear Arab names, testifying to Arab contributions to astronomy.

Often we know little about the very thing we think we know so much about. We have waged an entire war, devastated a nation, killed thousands of people, made homeless many thousands more, and yet we do not pause for a moment to think how Ibn al Haitham of Basra changed the world. In our arrogance we never dream that much of the technology of which we are so proud was born in the mind of a 10th Century Iraqi. We do not pause to take notice that once the caliphate centered in Baghdad equaled if not exceeded the importance and consequence of our own civilization. And perhaps even more paradoxically, neither does Al Qaeda because in its half-wit murderousness it simply doesn’t care.—DM

Every Arab civilization since the advent of Islam in the 7th Christian century has been forced to deal with armed tribes. It was the tribes under the leadership of the Umayyad caliphs that turned the Mediterranean into an Arab lake and carried the green banners of Islam into Europe.

But it was also the tribes that toppled many an Arab rule. Sometimes the tribes were Shia, more often Sunni, and sometimes Berber. The impossibility of disarming the tribes posed an exquisite dilemma. On the one hand, the armed tribal Arab was a racial prototype, much like the Scots highlander, the Viking, or our own frontiersman.

When Islam burst out of the Arabian peninsula it was on the horses of tribesmen to whom raiding and hunting was a way of life. But as Muslim rulers came to preside over vast areas and were confronted with the task of governing with an unwieldy bureaucracy they often came into conflict with their own tribes.

If we had had thoughtful rather than ideologically driven leaders in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, we might have heeded the experience of T.E. Lawrence. He needed a certain Arab chieftain, Auda Abu Tayi (inset, pastel by Eric Kennington), lord of the Howeitat tribe, to carry out his strategy against the Turks. But first he had to listen to a revealing speech by Auda, a speech we would have done well to heed:

I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say Arabs. Who are these Arabs of which you speak? I know Howeitat, I know Ruwallah, I know Shammar, I don’t know these Arabs you talk about. What is an Arab?

Lawrence understood the wily Auda very well. Lawrence’s talk about a chance to restore lost Arab glory was a careful British ploy to unite the Arabs just enough to serve Western schemes to topple the Ottoman Empire but not enough to resist British exploitation. It was a delicate balancing act, and Auda, just as wily as the British, decided to play along for rifles and plunder.

What Auda told Lawrence his ancestors might well have told their own caliphs and the caliphs of the Turks. When you talked about government to Auda, when you talked about a capital, a bureaucracy, a flag other than his own tribe’s, you were selling him snake oil. The tribal Arab does not trust central authority, and this is where his history converges with our own Second Amendment, because our own founders believed that if a citizenry could be disarmed it could be bullied into submission.

To misunderstand this about the Arabs—the tension between their aspirations as a Muslim people and their tribal history—is similar to misunderstanding the conviction of millions of Americans that a government that can disarm them can take away their liberties, as surely as fear-mongering has already taken away many of ours.

We were ourselves a hunting society, as the Arab Bedouins have historically been. If we hadn’t been blinded by ideology and the secret agendas of various Washington elites we would have at very least been able to ask ourselves a simple question:

If the Arabs themselves have been riven over the centuries by an inability to confine the Bedouin within a centralized and sedentary society in which people from others tribes and other places called the shots, what made us think we could barge into Iraq and sell the Arabs on the idea that our democracy was better than a tribal system that had served them well over millennia?

This combination of oil lust, ideological madness and arrogance was bound to prove at least as suspicious to the Arabs as British and French efforts to colonize them had been. The Arabs themselves understand fully what Sheik Auda Abu Tayi was saying. Their history is characterized by profound admiration on the one hand for the Bedouin and an equally profound exasperation on the other hand.

Whole Arab societies have fallen overnight either for encroaching upon the Bedouins or for drafting them into emergencies as mercenaries and then not being able to get rid of them. The Abbasid caliphs, who built the once fabled Baghdad with which we have become woefully familiar, thought it would be a good idea to supplant their unruly and unpredictable Bedouin warriors with Seljuk and then Ottoman mercenaries. It was a bad idea for the Arabs and a great idea for the Turks.

Bedouins destabilize Arab society precisely because their own social units are so stable. When a central Arab or foreign government says you must do this or that for the greater good, the Bedouins are invariably suspicious. Whose greater good? But Bedouins destabilize government only when they perceive a threat to their way of life.

On the other hand, much that is noble in the Arab character, much that characterizes the race is uniquely Bedouin. What could have possessed us—or the British or the French before us—to think that we could overturn all this with better ideas when the most glorious Arab societies, such as Cordoba, Palermo and Baghdad, had been at best able to hold the problem in check for a while?

Key aspects of our own government were adapted from the Iroquois nation, a hunting society. Why should we not have accorded Arab society the same respect when we determined to upset the existing order in Iraq and hand it over to foreign influence, namely Iran’s?

Just as surely as Sunni tribesmen in Iraq have turned against Al Qaeda, so they can turn against any central authority, whether it comes from the clergy or the secular government. My mother, an artist who made many drawings and paintings of Algerian Bedouins, once watched a group of Bedouins who had come to market listening to a cleric harangue them about their irreligious ways. They listened silently, and then an old Bedouin drew up close to the cleric and stuck his dagger under his chin. The other Bedouins chuckled and walked off. Anyone who studies Arab history would understand this incident.

When we tell the Arabs our way of life is superior to theirs, the line we are peddling in Iraq, we should remember the tribes have heard this a thousand times before from their own caliphs, from the Golden Horde, from the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, from the British, the French and the Germans. It was hogwash to them then and it is hogwash to them now. One reason the memory of Alexander the Great is held in esteem among the Arabs is that he wasn’t fool enough to try to change their way of life. Arabs have raised up magnificent societies—they are doing it today in parts of their world—but they understand the trigger points and tensions in their culture better than anybody else. We wouldn’t have tolerated them intervening to redress our racial injustices; how can we expect them to tolerate our meddling?

In the 1970s when Jordan clashed bloodily with Palestinians a Jordanian leader remarked, The trouble with the Palestinians is that they’re willing to fight to the last drop of Jordanian blood. This remark was rooted in Arab history. When ambitious rulers have needed warriors, they have looked to the Bedouins, but inevitably their desire to consolidate and rule comes into conflict with Bedouin independence. Americans should have been one of the peoples best suited to understand this about the Arabs, because the Americans who worry about inroads on their right to bear arms are in many ways quite like the Bedouins in their suspicion of central authority.

In North Africa the tribes didn’t want French culture or religion, but they liked Berthier and Lebel rifles. How far from our own Second Amendment in spirit are such tribesmen? They don’t trust government not to bully them. Our ideas of democracy smack of authoritarianism. They’ve heard it before from other Western societies. They’ve heard it from Muslims. It doesn’t wash. They trust their way of life, as we trust ours. The fact that we do not respect their history as much as we respect our own doomed our enterprise in Iraq from the start. Why should an intelligent people have trusted such reckless and disrespectful interlopers?—DM

If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom they treacherously outed, why didn’t he speak up, save thousands of lives, dollars and damages? That’s what many of his critics of the left and right are yowling.

As a man, perhaps a damned fool, I’ve spent at least half my life trying to figure out why I acquiesced in certain wrongs, why I was wronged, why I wronged others. I think it sometimes takes a long time to square yourself with the events in which you’ve played a role. I think it sometimes takes a while to figure out who your enemies were and are. And, yes, if you can’t make mid-course corrections you haven’t grown up.

Why did the Germans acquiesce to Nazi horrors? Why did the French gang up on Dreyfus, a loyal citizen? Why did we wantonly slaughter the Native Americans and enslave Africans out of greed? Why did Spain enslave the Indians?

It takes time to wake up from some nightmares. It takes time to reset some moral compasses. Sure, I know some people make decisions as fast and surely as John Wayne in his movies. I’ve seen men and women do just that, and I’ve admired them. But it’s not a universal gift. Sometimes I’ve risen to the task, but not always. It seems to me there are an awful lot of self-righteous people out there throwing stones at McClellan.

I’m willing to believe McClellan examined his soul, reviewed his part in wrongdoing, and made a decision to write about it. I don’t hear Dick Cheney or Karl Rove apologizing for ruining the career of Valerie Plame, a loyal American. I don’t hear the Administration saying it was wrong about anything when it can’t even account for $9 billion lost in Iraq, vanished. I don’t hear the networks apologizing for selling us all those retired generals pretending to be analyzing the war and all the while knowing they were paid Pentagon stooges pitching the war.

So what’s all this hullabaloo from the all too righteous on both sides of the political spectrum about a young man who seemingly got sucked into horrific deeds by people who had been his patrons and mentors? What’s so hard to understand about that, considering that we have all been suckered?       —DM

This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.

——————

The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our neighborhood mesmerized me. One day, chatting with a housecleaner in our apartment building, I used the word Hispanic, and she said, We are not Hispanic, we are Inca. The Spanish were oppressors. Once I had savored her practiced English, I understood what had caught my eye: so many of these people looked like wall paintings of the Incas.

I had a similar epiphany one day browsing through a National Geographic layout about North African architecture. Our own Southwestern architecture bears a strong resemblance to Moorish architecture in North Africa and Spain. Of course it would: the Spaniards brought it with them to the new world. And yet how many of us think of Moors when we think of Mexico or our Southwest? How many of us think of the great Inca civilization when we encounter immigrants?

I was reminded of my love of these synchronicities recently by an e-mail letter from our old friend, Tom Hester, a native of Lubbock, Texas, who worked for many years in the Justice Department with my wife in Washington and has now retired to Silver City, New Mexico. I had mentioned to him that Marilyn and I, like many residents of New York’s Dutchess and Columbia counties, are very conscious of the life and career of Robert R. Livingston, whose great estate, Clermont, is five minutes from our house in Germantown. Livingston, famous for many things, is one of the figures in John Trumbull’s familiar painting, The Declaration of Independence (above).

Tom wrote this splendid reponse:

Somehow it’s coincidentally significant for us west-of-the-Mississippi folk that you live on Livingston’s former property. Livingston was the U.S. ambassador to Napoleonic France who suggested to Jefferson that our country could obtain Spain’s previous territories.

Silver City lies in a half bowl, surrounded on three sides by steep hills and opening out to high desert that slopes away toward Mexico. When the Mimbres people lived here, they resided on a hill a scant fifty yards from where I write this. Their farms lay down below, for Silver City, like Washington, DC, occupies a marsh or cienega. It was a good place to farm the squash, chiles, beans and teocinte that they grew. The streams ran down from the hills, collected in the marsh and then evaporated as they seeped onto the desert. The village was a large one, by Mimbres or Mogollon standards, comprising about 100 pit houses at the time the drought in 1300 C.E. forced the people south towards their kin in what is called today Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Our street, by contouring scrapers or by nature, is terraced. The first house, built in the 1930s, lies to the east, below us. They did not have to fill, except on the back side of their lot, toward Silver City’s downtown and the desert beyond. The builder of our house, which is firmly set on rock, had to fill both the front and back yards: about eight feet in the front and 15 feet in the back. The yard and the rock patio still slope a gentle five degrees or so and we have a retaining wall, pierced with a wide stairs, that separates the upper back yard from the narrower, lower one where we have fruit trees. It is in this lower yard where I’m digging a pool.

The previous owners tended a lawn in the back and a xero yard in the front. I have kept the gravel and cacti on the north side but I have ripped out the lawn and created mounds and valleys for our native plants. Before coming to New Mexico, I had not heard of penstemons (snapdragons), but what peonies are to Virginians, penstemons are to New Mexicans. I have about six varieties blooming in our garden now, and each has a different way to declare: “Here I am! Catch your breath and look at me!” Bees love them.

Mentioning bees: We’ve lots of bees and butterflies, wasps and beetles. We just don’t have earthworms, even in the compost heaps.

Our eleven-year drought broke last year. For the past decade we had an annual average of nine inches of precipitation. Beginning in what is called the Monsoon Season (July and August), we’ve had more than 20 inches, including some significant snowfalls.