There’s enough good commentary about Egypt out there that I can hardly keep up with it. Almost all of it is written by Americans. For a slightly different take, see Benjamin Kerstein’s piece about what it’s like to observe Egypt right now from Israel.

I’ve just arrived at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and will be here as a visiting media fellow all week. Thanks very much to Victor Davis Hanson for inviting me.

I decided to drive rather than fly and have been away from the Internet for two days. It’s amazing how far behind I am on email, news, and everything else after so short a time. I’ll get caught up and will be back shortly.

I will also be taking pre-orders for autographed copies of my book soon. Watch this space and make sure you have a PayPal account if you want to order one.

Arab countries make look more or less the same from remote distances, but they are radically different up close and in person. The data are different, too. Egypt’s is terrible.

See Barry Rubin:

The chances for democracy and liberalism are different in every country. Tunisia has a good chance because there is a strong middle class and a weak Islamist movement. But in Egypt look at the numbers in the latest Pew poll.

In Egypt, 30 percent like Hizballah (66 percent don’t). 49 percent are favorable toward Hamas (48 percent are negative); and 20 percent smile (72 percent frown) at al-Qaida. Roughly speaking, one-fifth of Egyptians applaud the most extreme Islamist terrorist group, while around one-third back revolutionary Islamists abroad. This doesn’t tell us what proportion of Egyptians want an Islamist government at home, but it is an indicator.

In Egypt, 82 percent want stoning for those who commit adultery; 77 percent would like to see whippings and hands cut off for robbery; and 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.

Asked if they supported “modernizers” or “Islamists” only 27 percent said modernizers while 59 percent said Islamists:

Is this meaningless? Last December 20 I wrote that these “horrifying figures in Egypt…one day might be cited to explain an Islamist revolution there….What this analysis also shows is that a future Islamist revolution in Egypt and Jordan is quite possible.

I worry that the 59 percent of Egyptians who prefer Islamists to modernizers are going to have to learn the hardest way possible–as the Iranians have and the people of Gaza are learning right now–that modernizers are better. There may not be another way.

Egyptians are hoping to replicate Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and overthrow Hosni Mubarak’s calcified military dictatorship. It’s hard to tell what, exactly, is happening there because the government completely shut off the Internet, but some reports are trickling out.

Mubarak’s headquarters were reportedly set on fire.

Police officers are using live ammunition on protestors, and, unlike in Tunisia, the military is backing them up and has even sent tanks into the streets.

Nobel Laureate Mohammed ElBaradei has been placed under house arrest.

Lee Smith, who lived in Cairo for a couple of years, doesn’t expect this to end well. I don’t either. I wish I did, but I don’t.

Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden says Mubarak is not a dictator. Egypt has never been ruled by anyone but a dictator. Let’s not pretend he’s something else just because he’s an “ally.”

“To all those who think that Lebanon does not matter to US interests, let me tell you this: whether it is the fight between the US and Iran, or the fight between western liberalism and arab medievalism, or the fight between acceptance of Israel or rejection, or the advance of human rights in the region or lack of advance, or the fight between religious tolerance and islamic extremism, WHOEVER WINS IN LEBANON WINS!” – Joe

So Hezbollah did it. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has been replaced with Najib Miqati, a man billed as a “compromise” leader who is time zones away from being a Hezbollah member but who nevertheless agrees with Hezbollah on the few things — which ultimately add up to everything — that matter most.

Miqati says he’s an independent centrist who disagrees with Hezbollah as much as he disagrees with everyone else in Lebanon. I believe him, actually, so long as he’s referring to the number of things he disagrees with Hezbollah about. He’s a Sunni and therefore obviously not a cheerleader for the parochial Shia sectarian interests that Hezbollah champions. There’s no chance he endorses the Iranian government’s reigning ideology of Velayat-e faqih, the totalitarian theocratic system Hezbollah would love to impose on Lebanon if it had the strength — which it doesn’t. Miqati is a billionaire businessman and does not even remotely share Hezbollah’s cartoonish paranoia about global capitalism and how it’s supposedly a nefarious Jewish-American plot.

What Miqati will do, however, is safeguard “the resistance,” as he has promised — meaning he won’t ask Hezbollah to hand over its weapons to the authorities — which is one of only two things Hezbollah requires of him. The second is repudiate the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Everyone now expects the tribunal to indict Hezbollah for the assassination of the Sunni former prime minister Rafik Hariri, an event that may severely damage Hezbollah’s standing in the majority-Sunni Arab world even if it does have a prominent Sunni willing to provide some cover.

Hezbollah also needs, and will get, the same from Lebanon’s Christian president Michel Suleiman. Anything else these two leaders do in their official capacities is irrelevant from Hezbollah’s perspective.

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

“A Hezbollah-controlled government would clearly have an impact on our bilateral relationship,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today. That would be true even if she and the president wished that it weren’t. The new prime minister, Najib Mikati, is far too cultured and polished to pump his fist in the air and yell “Death to America,” but he’ll have to answer to people who do.

“We hope to see a government emerge that will serve the interests of the people of Lebanon and sustain the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon,” she also said. This is the sort of thing diplomats are supposed to say, but there is no chance it will happen. Lebanon’s new post-Hariri government will follow Syrian and Iranian orders. Or else.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy tried to remind Syria that “Lebanon is an independent country,” but he’s too late. Lebanon isn’t Gaza and it never will be, but it is, like Gaza, a vassal state of Tehran and Damascus and will be treated accordingly—especially by the Israelis.

I was there when the Lebanese threw out the Syrians in 2005, and I’m sorry as hell that it has come to this. Dark days are ahead.

UPDATE: Representative Howard Berman (D-California), who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says this is a “sad day for Lebanon” which has been rendered “a satellite of Iran…I call on President Obama immediately to suspend all weapons transfers to Lebanon and to review carefully all economic assistance programs in order to ensure that they are not inadvertently strengthening Hezbollah.”

So Hezbollah got its way and replaced Prime Minister Saad Hariri with Najib Mikati. Lebanon’s president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament are now all, to one extent or another, aligned with the Syrian-Iranian Resistance Bloc even though that coalition lost the election.

Lee Smith’s analysis is spot-on:

In Lebanon, every time a confessional sect tries to overextend its prerogatives at the expense of its neighbors, it pays the price. It happened to the Christians as well as the Sunnis and it will probably happen with the Shia as well. It is impossible not to fear for the fate of Lebanon’s large Shia community, which tied its fate to Hezbollah, and thus the Islamic Republic of Iran, an obscurantist clerical regime that imagined it could overturn 1400 years of Middle East history and triumph at last over the Sunnis. It is a story full of pathos, for in the end all Tehran had at its disposal was terror and a nuclear weapons program that could be derailed with a computer worm. What will happen to the Shia and who will protect them when Hezbollah is finished?

After all, the reason that Hezbollah fears the tribunal is because they understand that having been named guilty in the murder of a Sunni leader, they will have shown that they are not the Islamic resistance fighting the Zionist entity, but a sectarian project directed against the Sunnis. Their war against Israel was meant to earn them prestige in the great Sunni sea that has engulfed the Shia for more than a millennium. Now they have forfeited all that.

In the meantime, Lebanon is governed by a terrorist organization, which means that unlike Hezbollah’s patrons in Iran and Syria, the country is not merely a state sponsor of terror, but is an actual terrorist state…

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Barry Rubin is also correct:

Of course, Hizballah is not going to convert Lebanon into an Islamist republic. Why start a civil war with the Christians and Sunni Muslims. Just leave them alone in their territorial enclaves. But the Islamists and their partners will control the apparatus of state, foreign policy, and all the key decisions.

David Pryce-Jones reminds us how Hezbollah’s masters and armorers behave in their own country where there are no checks and balances: “Fifty-seven people have been executed already this year in Iran. That means the ayatollahs are hanging someone every eight hours. Last year they executed at least 180 people, a total they will surpass in a matter of weeks at the present rate. Most of the victims are hanged in public and there are sickening photographs of bodies on the gallows with a watchful crowd standing back a bit. The idea of course is to intimidate those bystanders, and it must work up to the point when they can take no more of it, and revolt.”

Lebanese Sunnis are blocking roads and burning tires to protest what they say is a coup d’etat by Hezbollah. Saad Hariri most likely won’t be prime minister for very much longer, not because he lost an election but because Hezbollah is threatening his allies and pressuring them to throw their “support” behind a pro-Syrian replacement.

No community in Lebanon is allowed to select or de-select the leader of a different community, yet an Iranian-backed Shia militia is now poised to do both to the Sunnis. They are not going to tolerate the removal of Hariri as their zaim, especially not at a time when the United Nations is about to indict Hezbollah for car-bombing his father.

I can practically hear Lebanese Sunnis locking and loading from here.

Lebanon’s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt now says he “supports” Hezbollah and the ghastly regime in Syria that murdered his father and his friend Rafik Hariri. Hezbollah’s fan boys should not kid themselves here. Jumblatt is under duress and is only saying what he must to ensure his own survival and that of his people.

Saad Hariri remains defiant, but Michael Young—the best analyst of Lebanon’s internal politics—thinks he probably won’t return as prime minister. If that’s the case, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution is well and truly cooked. Beirut is being cleverly reconquered by Damascus and Tehran, and is rejoining, against its will, the Iran-led Resistance Bloc.

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

“We are now,” Rick Richman writes in Commentary, “in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer.”

UPDATE: And on that note, see the latest from Barry Rubin: Why Obama Administration Peace Process Policy Will Be A Total Waste of Time in 2011.

Come on. You know it’s true. Or maybe you’re like the mom character in the Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. “They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years,” she says. “It can’t be much longer.”

Hollywood has put out a lot of crap lately, though I agree with Roger L. Simon that Winter’s Bone is excellent. Also worth taking a look at is Eichmann, a film that was just released to DVD that hardly anyone has seen or even heard of.

One of my readers in Poland bought this for me as a gift (thanks, Małgorzata), and I urge everyone here to either buy it or rent it.

Somehow the events depicted never cease to shock and appall me all over again whenever I’m forced to confront them. That’s as it should be, and it’s the reason films like this need to be made and seen by as many people as possible.

Tunisia is ahead of its fellow Arab nations for a number of reasons. Its broad and well-educated middle class, its more or less free market economy, its thoroughly Mediterranean identity, and its Western orientation set it apart from most of the others.

Another critical difference is its approach to religion which is more like that found in Kurdistan and the Balkans than in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, read Lafif Lakhdar’s essay Moving from Salafi to Rationalist Education in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. See also Teaching Islam in Saudi Arabia by Barry Rubin and State and Islamism in the Maghreb by Aziz Enhaili and Oumelkheir Adda at the GLORIA Center. (Thanks to Barry Rubin for pointing to all of these.)

Here’s the gist of it, though, from Lakhdar, if all you need is the bottom line:

[A]n educational project aimed at preparing new generations properly must produce citizens equipped for the contemporary age, who think independently of their forefathers and who are good at using logical reasoning instead of leaning on the authority of the text. They should accept, without any complication or feeling of guilt, the rational and human institutions, sciences and values of their age, even those which contradict with their ancestors’ heritage and tradition.

Such a school is as yet non-existent in any part of the Arab World except Tunisia which has managed, especially since 1990, to restructure religious education in a way that breaks away from the salafi school. The salafi school relies on the authority of the literal religious text in its superficial form, steering clear of any interpretation which takes into account an historical reading of the text. It is only through such an historical reading that Islamic religious discourse may be renovated and Islam may be adapted to modernity, especially since it has become clear that adapting modernity to Islam–the so-called Islamization of modernity–was a trick to evade modernity itself. Open religious rationalism–subjecting the religious text to rational investigation and research–ought to become the core of the aspired religious education in the Arab-Islamic region, since it is absurd to believe the text and deny reality.

The salafi school instills in the younger generation a religious fanaticism which entails a phobia toward dissimilarity and a rejection of the other, even to the extent of killing.

In contrast, the rational religious school equips religious education with modern sciences. One of these is the comparative study of religions, including those that are extinct (such as the Babylonian and the Egyptian), which helps to understand the historical development of the three monotheist religions. The sociology of religion teaches the young generations the social functions of religion, and how it was exploited by social and political actors. Psychology teaches these generations that God is similar to the father, which is the origin of the idea of God as offering paternal protection as well as comfort and solace during hardships. Religion also responds to a basic deep-rooted need in the human psyche: the need for a second life; Sigmund Freud said that the subconscious is dominated by an aspiration for eternity. Linguistics teaches young generations that the religious text is a convergence of texts which interacted throughout history and that each text is prone to interpretation due to its metaphoric character. Students can then think about the sacred text on their own, and interpret it according to people’s interests and needs, as well as the requirements of the times.

Philosophy promotes critical thinking–an ingredient sorely missing in our heritage. Students can thus practice creative questioning instead of relying on ready-made answers either imported from outside or deduced from the heritage of their forefathers. Worth mentioning in this context is that the philosophy curriculum now taught in Tunisia during the last two years of secondary education is similar to what is given in French schools. It is also taught at Zaitouna University, a religious faculty, as are all other scientific studies including technical specializations.

Human rights studies guarantee the modernization and rationalization of Islamic consciousness through advocating values of modernity and rationalism. This is necessary to deal with the fact that Islamic consciousness has distanced itself from modernity, on the pretext that it is the domain of Jews and Christians and thus should be disproved even if it is good for Muslims.

[…]

The religious education prevalent in the Arab world, except for Tunisia, fights the modern reading necessary for Islam today. Consequently, I herewith present models of Islamic education based upon jihad, which antagonizes the other in its broader meaning: the self, women, non-Muslims, life and reason. In contradistinction, I will present a sample of the curriculum taught at the Tunisian Zaitouna University, which I consider a solid base for teaching the religious rationalism we so badly need.

You can dig into the rest of it here.

A Hezbollah “senior political source” supposedly told al-Sharq al-Awsat that the Party of God will act “moderately” until the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon formally announces its indictments in March for the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005.

I have no idea if the quote is real or fake, a threat or a bluff, but I have my doubts that Lebanon can hold it together. The country might muddle through without exploding for a while, but it’s not looking good.

UPDATE: From NOW Lebanon:

MTV on Tuesday quoted an unnamed Hezbollah source as saying that his party is moving toward endorsing escalatory steps.

The Tuesday gatherings serve as a warning that these steps have already begun, he added.

The source warned that the UN ESCWA headquarters in Downtown Beirut might be Hezbollah’s target in the party’s next move.

“[Tuesday’s] gatherings are a message to the [Lebanese people] and foreign [parties] that Lebanon has entered the stage following the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s (STL) issuance of an indictment.”

“[This is the stage] Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah spoke about when he said [things] will be different.”

I hope the UN has drawn up an evacuation plan for its employees. Things can get very ugly very quickly in Lebanon.

Khelil Bouarrouj, a libertarian American from Tunisia, wrote the following letter to David Boaz at the Cato Institute urging a little less pessimism about the prospects in his home country.

While Tunisia has never been a true democracy, the largely educated middle class in the nation is well-learned when it comes to the principles of a free society. The regime’s authoritarianism does not speak for the courageous Tunisian lawyers, activists and students; along with the general professional class. Tunisians know what a free press looks like. They’ve seen it around the world when they travel and social networks have served as a dissident channel. And let me add without hyperbole that on Saturday Tunisians awoke to a free press. The usually propagandistic state television changed its logo (which was a regime ensign) and became a voice for free debate with call-ins from average Tunisians. The private media was hosting panel discussions and it was stunning: people have shaken off the fear, and educated journalists and other civil society individuals were openly debating and discussing a whole host of issues. The newspapers that were published that morning ceased with self-censorship, and their coverage and editorials became free forums. A casual reader and observer of the press/media would conclude that it is dominated by a liberal social class with strong democratic values and articulation. In short, the past absence of an institutionalized free press does not mean that Tunisians do not understand the merit of free debate and differing voices. They always have and needed only the opportunity to breathe, which they have now seized.

This lesson, I believe, applies to democracy as well. The fact is that liberal social norms have been ingrained in Tunisian culture: a secular state, equal rights for women, higher education, religious tolerance, etc. I do not state this as a patriot, who has certainly been emotionally moved in recent days, but as an observer who has numerous family and friends in the nation and been engaged in countless political discussions.

The images of the protesters themselves tell a story. Unlike in other Arab nations, the opposition was not uncouth Islamists but a liberal middle class and students. The demonstrations at colleges had Arab youth spell out the word freedom (which was widely evoked during the month), and this was not just a slogan but a genuinely understood ideal. The nation is ready to be a true democracy and truly entrench democratic values. The cultural ethos is already democratic and this is what led to the protests, defining their voice and even the demand that the transition government adhere to the very letter of the constitution. After the president fled, the prime minister took over but Tunisian lawyers immediately declared it unconstitutional (as it was), along with buzzing messages on Facebook by the newly energized populace, and within hours the premier handed power to the speaker of the parliament according to the constitution. The high court has declared that elections shall be held in 60 days per the constitution as well.

Tunisians wanted to start off right with respect for the rule of law. And that’s just it: this nation has been democratic at heart; the recipe for democracy if you will, and the rule of law is understood, respected by Tunisians and had been upheld even under the past regime with the obvious exception of the corrupt and now dethroned ruling elite. Tunisians precisely threw them out because of their repressive rule and flagrant abuse of the law. And the fact is that the people are so committed to a free, democratic Tunisia and the rule of law that they did not acquiesce to an unconstitutional transfer of power, even though they had achieved their main objective of expelling the president and the premier was going to reign solely as a temporary president until elections are held.

Read the whole thing.

Things could certainly turn out badly, but it would be a terrible mistake to assume the Islamists are all but sure to take over as if this were happening not in Tunisia, but Egypt or Gaza.

Christopher Hitchens visited Tunisia in 2007 and saw the same things I did:

On the face of it, the country is one of Africa’s most outstanding success stories. In the 2006–7 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, it was ranked No. 1 in Africa for economic competitiveness, even, incidentally, outpacing three European states (Italy, Greece, and Portugal). Home ownership is 80 percent. Life expectancy, the highest on the continent, is 72. Less than 4 percent of the population is below the poverty line, and the alleviation of misery by a “solidarity fund” has been adopted by the United Nations as a model program. Nine out of 10 households are connected to electricity and clean water. Tunisia is the first African state to have been accepted as an associate member of the European Union. Its Code of Personal Status was the first in the Arab world to abolish polygamy, and the veil and the burka are never seen. More than 40 percent of the judges and lawyers are female. The country makes delicious wine and even exports it to France. The Tunisian Jews make a potent grappa out of figs, which is available as a digestif in most restaurants. There were several moments, as I was loafing around the beautiful blue-and-white seaside towns or the exquisite classical museums and ruins, when the combination of stylish females, excellent food, clean streets, smart-looking traffic cops, and cheap and efficient taxis made me feel I was in a place more upscale than many European recreational resorts and spas. I remembered what my old friend the late Edward Said had told me: “You should go to Tunisia, Christopher. It’s the gentlest country in Africa. Even the Islamists are highly civilized!”

But before I could be seduced into abject boosterism, I had a lengthy, not to say lavish, dinner with some of the country’s academics and intellectuals and writers. The atmosphere in the restaurant was quasi–Left Bank Parisian, and I think I lulled them a bit by recounting some of the Davos statistics cited above. Then I added two more. Since its independence from France, in 1956, Tunisia has had exactly two presidents, the first of whom, Habib Bourguiba, became a “president for life” before being deposed for senility and megalomania. The current ruler, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, will celebrate his 20th year of uninterrupted power this November. At election times, he has been known to win more than 90 percent of the vote: a figure that never fails to make me nervous. I have not met the man, but within hours of landing in the country I could have passed an exam in what he looks like, because his portrait is rather widely displayed.

Well, you can say for Tunisia that people do not lower their voices or look over their shoulders (another thing that has made me nervous in my time) before discussing these questions. But the conversation still took on a slightly pained tone. Was the West—that’s me—not judging the country by rather exacting standards? To the east lay the huge territory of Libya, underdeveloped and backward and Islamized even though floating on a lake of oil, and, furthermore, governed since 1969 by a flamboyantly violent nutcase. (“We are the same people as them,” said my friend Hamid, “but they are so much en retard.”) To the west lay the enormous country of Algeria, again artificially prosperous through oil and natural gas, but recently the scene of a heinous Islamist insurgency that—along with harsh and vigorous state repression—had killed perhaps 150,000 people. Looking farther away and to the south, Sudan’s fanatical and genocidal militia, not content with what they had done in Darfur, were spreading their jihad into neighboring Chad, extending a belt of violent Islamism across the sub-Saharan zone. Increasingly, Africa was becoming the newest site of confrontation not just between Islam and other religions (as in the battle between Christian Ethiopia and Islamist Somalia, or between Islamists and Christians in Nigeria, or Islamists and Christians and animists in Sudan) but between competing versions of Islam itself. Why pick on mild Tunisia, where the coup in 1987 had been bloodless, where religious parties are forbidden, where the population grows evenly because of the availability of contraception, where you can see male and female students holding hands and wearing blue jeans, and where thousands of Americans and more than four million Europeans take their vacations every year?

When it’s put like that, who wouldn’t want the alternative of an African Titoism, or perhaps an African Gaullism, where presidential rule keeps a guiding but not tyrannical hand? A country where people discuss micro-credits for small business instead of “macro” schemes such as holy war? Mr. Ben Ali does not make lengthy speeches on TV every night, or appear in gorgeously barbaric uniforms, or live in a different palace for every day of the week. Tunisia has no grandiose armed forces, the curse of the rest of the continent, feeding parasitically off the national income and rewarding their own restlessness with the occasional coup. And the country is lucky in other ways as well. Its population is a smooth blend of black and Berber and Arab, and though it proudly defends its small minorities of Shiites, Christians (Saint Augustine spent time here), Baha’is, and Jews (there is a Jewish member of the Senate), it is otherwise uniformly Sunni. It has been spared the awful toxicity of ethnic and religious rivalry, which makes it very unusual in Africa. Its international airport is named Tunis-Carthage, evoking African roots without Afrocentric demagogy. I still could not shake the feeling that its system of government is fractionally less intelligent and risktaking than the majority of its citizens.

I don’t know how seriously we should take this, but an Australian newspaper reports that the foreign object of fear and loathing right now in Tunisia isn’t the U.S. or Israel, but Libya.

Many Tunisians fear that President Gaddafi of neighbouring Libya will intervene to prevent the popular revolt spreading to his country.

Mezri Haddad, who resigned last week as Tunisia’s ambassador to Unesco in protest against Mr Ben Ali’s rule, said yesterday that the former president had sought Mr Gaddafi’s help for a “scorched earth” policy.

“He gave weapons and lots of money to his close protection teams and his loyalists so that they could provoke civil war on his departure from Tunisia. He gave them the order to launch operations well before he fled,” he said.

“He sought Libya’s aid to intervene. All this has only one goal: to retake power.”

Libya does have a history of this sort of behavior, and it’s true that Gaddafi (or however his name is being spelled this week) has been openly supporting Ben Ali’s regime, unlike other governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

Here he is hectoring his neighbors for overthrowing their dictator.

I mentioned that Robert Kaplan almost single-handedly inspired me to visit Tunisia. The reason I say “almost” is because William Langewiesche is the other one who gets credit. He didn’t inspire me to visit Tunisia per se, but while reading his extraordinary book Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert — my favorite of all his books — I knew I had to go to North Africa.

Here is a taste:

Do not regret the passing of the camel and the caravan. The Sahara has changed, but it remains a desert without compromise, the world in its extreme. There is no place as dry and hot and hostile. There are few places as huge and as wild. You will not diminish it by admitting that its inhabitants can drive, and that they are neither wiser nor purer nor stronger than you. It is fairer to judge them squarely as modern people and your equals. They were born by chance in a hard land, at a hard time in its history. You will do them no justice by pretending otherwise. Do not worry that their world, or yours, has grown too small. Despite its roads, its trucks, its televisions, the Sahara remains unsubdued.

[…]

The Sahara is the earth stripped of its gentleness, a place that consumes the careless and the unlucky. But all you need to navigate it is a suitcase, a bit of cash, an occasional bus ticket, the intention to move on. Such simplicity appeals to me. Wars and borders allowing, I expected now to cross the Sahara in an arc from the Mediterranean south to the African savanna, and west to the Atlantic. The route would make me through the desert’s hyper-arid core — a place nearly sterilized by drought, where bacteria cannot survive, and where cadavers, partially mummified, decompose slowly like sun-dried dates. The Sahara has horizons so bare that drivers mistake stones for diesel trucks, and so lonely that migrating birds land beside people just for the company. The certainty of such sparseness can be a lesson. I lay in Algiers in a hotel room in a storm, thinking there is no better sound than the splash of rain. The desert teaches by taking away.

There aren’t many well-written and interesting books about Tunisia in English, but Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese by Robert Kaplan, who is always worth reading, is excellent. I gave my copy to a man named Mohammad in Douz who teaches English literature to the children of the Sahara and should probably pick up another one.