Robert Ferrigno's Prayers For The Assassin

There are some books that you pick up, and you can't stop reading them--no matter how late it is. Take a look at the time stamp on this blog entry--and notice that I mentioned just a few hours ago that I was starting to read it. Quite literally, I could not sleep. I tried to stop a bit more than half-way through and go to sleep. I even took antihistamines. But it didn't work.

I will not tell you enough to spoil the plot--just what you find out on the back cover. The novel is set in the Islamic States of America in the year 2040, 25 years after nuclear weapon attacks on New York City, Washington, DC, and Mecca, have been blamed on the Israeli government. This is a detective novel involving a sociopathic killer, and a history professor who starts to turn up evidence that the attacks were done by... someone else. (If this premise seems ridiculous, notice how much of the left has now decided that the 9/11 attacks were done by the Mossad, or arranged by George Bush. Intellectuals are capable of believing all sorts of absurd things without batting an eye.)

Now, if you have read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Tower, set in an America where the Germans and the Japanese win World War II--and partition the United States between them--you are familiar with this type of novel. There's at least one science fiction short story that I have read, the title of which escapes me, in which a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos during World War II with qualms about the weapon that he is developing ingests peyote, and ends up a future where the Nazis win World War II. A defining characteristic of these "What if?" alternative histories is that there is some defining moment that changes history.

Sometimes it is a very minor event that causes the disruption. When I was young, my father liked to recite a little piece of doggerel that captures this idea of how even the smallest details can cascade into momentous results:

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For the want of a rider, the battle was lost.
For the want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a nail!

If I had to pick a single complaint in an otherwise gripping, crisply written, often powerful but subtle novel, it is Ferrigno's two premises that:

1. In the event of an unprecedented national disaster, American religious beliefs are so tremendously malleable that large numbers of Americans would either genuinely become Muslims, or go through the motions of it.

2. That Hollywood celebrities, while tremendously of interest to many Americans, would be so effective in promoting such mass conversions to Islam. I go along with the almost unstated premise that much of Hollywood is so completely empty spiritually that they could be persuaded or manipulated into a new religion--but it wouldn't be Islam, which has rules, but more likely, it would be a "designer religion" such as Madonna's celebrity-modified Kaballah, or Oliver Stone's terribly convenient Buddhism.

Where this novel really shines, however, is how it paints what America (after most Protestants, black and white, had moved to a newly separated nation roughly corresponding to the South) might be like, with fundamentalist, moderate, and "modern" Muslims all jockeying for power. To Ferrigno's credit, he captures the tremendously brutal and totalitarian society that would result. Remember that even "moderate" Islam makes conservative Christians look like the ACLU by comparison. (Which makes the ACLU's current efforts to prevent the NSA from preventing terrorist attacks all the more disturbing.)

Best of all, Ferrigno paints with a fine camel's hair brush, not with a paint roller. You won't find the sort of clumsy speeches that, regrettably, marred Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I find it interesting that Ferrigno paints the centers of Islamic fundamentalism in the new America concentrated in the places most prone to leftist derangement today--places such as Seattle and San Francisco. While Ferrigno is never explicit about it, it is instructive that members of lunatic fringe groups seem to have no problem leaping quite astonishing political chasms--because it is the fanaticism that defines the kooks, more than individual belief systems.

I remember some years ago reading about a political science professor who, as an experiment, arranged for some Communists he knew to attend a neo-Nazi event--and a number changed allegiance. The fervor mattered more than the details--the sense of, "I have the truth, and everyone else is just not as smart as me." As an example, the Rev. Fred Phelps--the guy with the "God Hates Fags" signs at gay funerals--used to be a highly regarded left-wing attorney, with awards from the NAACP for his work.

As an example of Ferrigno's subtlety, there are perhaps three or four references in the book to air pollution, drilling in ANWR, and off the Southern California coast. There's no heavy points being made--these are just mentioned as part of the scenery, and they are exactly what we might expect such a society to do without debate or discussion, because of its totalitarian nature.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is that nearly all the characters are Muslims--although the protagonist is, by his own admission, a "bad Muslim." He never goes to mosque, seldom prays, and observes the rules only to the extent that the Religious Police enforce those rules. There are a couple of Catholic characters as well--and Ferrigno presents a scenario that at first seemed bizarre to me, of the Islamic government tolerating (sort of) Catholics, but not Protestants.

The more I thought about it, however, it struck me that much of the left in the U.S. regards Islam as less offensive than Protestant Christianity, hence the widespread efforts to inculcate an "understanding" of Islam in public schools after 9/11--with methods that would lead to a lawsuit from the ACLU, if the ACLU took seriously their ahistoric theory of "separation of church and state."

Ferrigno does a nice job of conveying what a tremendously brutal society this would be--with the heads of homosexuals mounted on the fenceposts along the Bay Bridge, stonings of adulterous women, assassinations by various mullahs jockeying for power--you know, just another typical week in some Arab countries for most of the last few decades. It is rather jarring, also, to imagine a society where instead of Disneyland, kids come to Palestine Adventure theme park near San Francisco, and get pictures taken wearing suicide bomber vests. (Alas, Ferrigno really isn't off the deep end on this--you may recall that Muslim children wearing simulated suicide bomber vests was all the rage at demonstrations in Europe a couple of years ago.)

Another example of Ferrigno's subtlety is how he merges liberal interest group goals--such as bans on private handgun ownership and personalized guns that can only be fired by the authorized government employee--and weaves them into the story. And he does it with a very deft touch.

One area where Ferrigno may have been a bit too subtle is with respect to taxation and legal disabilities. Muslim societies have always put non-Muslims at distinct disadvantages as a way to not very subtly pressure Jews and Christians into conversion (when not engaging in flat-out extermination, as sometimes happened). The Ottoman Empire, for example, annually taxed Jews and Christians on their net worth--at times as much as 10%. Think about how long it would take for a 10% annual tax of your net worth (as opposed to your income) to drive even a wealthy person into poverty, and you can understand why Islam was so effective at "converting the masses" everywhere it went. Ferrigno makes one very passing reference to Islam's tax of non-Muslims, and the role that this played in causing the masses to convert.

Now, this is definitely not a kid's book. One of the characters is a sociopathic assassin--and in perhaps Ferrigno's least subtle moment, his first name comes from that a rather prominent 19th century scientist. We can guess that while he went through the motions of being a Muslim to join the Fedayeen (assassin division), Mom and Dad probably gave him this name as a expression of their contempt for the values of Christian America. Being a sociopathic assassin, he enjoys killing people in ways that are horrific (except by the standards of al-Qaeda).

Dialog is, in a few places, a little more raw than I would want to expose a teenager to, and even a fair number of adults will regret what is, unfortunately, realistic adult dialog--especially when two of the protagonists are people trained to kill without remorse.

There is a bit of sex in Prayers for the Assassin, and again, perhaps a little more explicit than I would want to expose some teenagers to, and some adults who haven't lived in centers of depravity such as the San Francisco Bay Area may find it a bit more explicit than they would prefer. On the other hand, there are aspects to Ferrigno's depiction of the sexual degradation of women that are probably necessary, because this, unfortunately, is one of the problems in those Islamofascist societies that have gone off the deep end in their contempt for women.

I was a little surprised at the level of sexual adventuresomeness of the hero and heroine of the book, especially because both of them have grown up in a society vastly more censored with respect to erotica than America was in say, 1966. Of course, even Muslim societies, for all their supposed restrictions, have widespread problems with illicit sexuality. Homosexuality is utterly prohibited by Islam--and yet everyone knows that there is a lot of it, and much of it in the category of rape. I mentioned a couple of years ago my skepticism at the claim that sexual abuse of children is widespread in Middle Eastern societies--and then discovered that a folk song in Afghanistan has the lyrics:

“There’s a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach. But, alas, I cannot swim ...”

A co-worker fluent in Turkish, at least conversant in Arabic, and widely traveled in that part of the world, confirmed that adult men pursuing little boys as sexual partners is widespread. Perhaps I should not assume that Ferrigno's hero and heroine are so unrealistic.

I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed reading it, and it serves as a valuable cautionary tale--and now that I am done reading it, I think I can finally get some sleep! As long as I don't think about the coming conflict with Iran about nuclear weapons....

UPDATE: A couple of readers have suggested that the story about the Los Alamos worker who is given a chance to see the future where the U.S. doesn't develop nuclear weapons is C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" (1958). I believe that this is correct. I am only slightly surprised to find that there is an entire website devoted to these "alternative history" books and stories:

Uchronia: The Alternate History List is an annotated bibliography of over 2700 novels, stories, essays and other printed material involving the "what ifs" of history. The genre has a variety of names, but it's best known as alternate history.

In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story. Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are "What if the Nazis won World War II?" and "What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?"

A number of readers have also pointed out that what I found implausible--widespread conversion to Islam--is perhaps less absurd than it first sounds. One reader observes:

Paul Johnson made the argument in his "History of Christianity" that Egypt and the African littoral readily converted to Islam because it solved the major disagreement they had over Christianity: the Monophysite heresy. By analogy, if you are a "modern, enlightened" Christian (think Bishop Spong), who believes that Jesus wasn't *really* the Son of God (you know, the "Jesus-was-a-great-teacher-and-philosopher" school), you might find Islam (God is God, Mohammed is His prophet) easier to swallow than your own orthodoxy!

Another reader pointed out that American Protestantism's strong democratic political structure would make it harder than control than Catholicism's more hierarchical form.

Finally, I should mention that one of the great recent surprises in the study of American slavery history is the increasing evidence that many African imports were Muslim--and this may have actually accelerated their acceptance of Christianity, relative to those Africans who were animists. Muslims at least accept the idea of one God, and regard Judaism and Christianity as substantially closer to Islam than purely pagan religions. Perhaps the trauma of being sold away from home broke a slave's confidence in his religion, and peer pressure from Christian slaves made these transitions easier.