Jonathan Raban's books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle. »

My Holy War

Dispatches from the Home Front

By Jonathan Raban

Ranging from Seattle to Cairo, from the high seas to the US presidential campaign, Raban brings a distinctive and often unexpected perspective to the issues facing post–September 11 America.

What does the "war on terror" and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds, as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity.

Raban reflects on the Bush administration's manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East, and explains the region's shifting and complex loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism: the tendency of Americans to be inspired by a religious fervor oblivious to history and reason. And he explores the increasing polarization of American politics, as exemplified by the issues that he has seen divide his urban from his non urban neighbors in the Northwest.

Reviews

We need sane voices in these times, and they don't come much saner, or indeed much more alert and stylish, than Jonathan Raban's....This collection of pieces is more than just a ragbag of occasional journalism (not that I have anything against ragbags). It works as a unified entity, a diary of anxiety and alarm caused by the current 'war on terrorism'; a declaration of war, as he puts it, 'like declaring war on tanks, or bows and arrows'. But it is also a useful primer, for those who need to be primed, on the relevant background details.
— Nicolas Lezard, The Guardian

Raban is a wonderful writer, with great powers of description, and above all the ability to interpret with elegant tact and lightness in the sort of tone one might use to criticize someone else’s child without giving offense.
— Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books

Raban's specialty is the sly, unsparing metaphor and jarring observation.
— Village Voice Literary Supplement

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