Yesterday I was reading West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American. On page 122, he recollects a conversation with his kid brother Riaz. Riaz has become a devout Muslim, and explains his conversion by saying, "I realized that Islam would work.... If everyone followed these practices, none of today's problems would exist. Families would be rock-solid. There would be no warfare, no injustice, no division between the rich and the poor."
This sounded very familiar to me. In my novel (page 307) the teenage Elijah has also been seeking an answer to the injustices of the world. He falls in with the Rekhabites, a back-to-nomadism cult. The leader explains that all the wickedness of 9th Century BCE Israel is due to dividing the land and taking up farming instead of herding flocks. "If we all owned the land together, the strongest couldn't steal it. You can run your sheep on it, but you can't buy it or sell it or borrow against it. Right there you eliminate greed and envy.... Women are a problem. But we still don't have to behave like animals. A father should marry his children off young, before lust drives them to sin.... A man without a mate is a torch in a haystack. Though when men fight over a woman, she usually provoked it. You've got to teach a girl to cover up...."
It seems that every generation has its cult groups, political or religious, that offer simple rules to cope with the complexities of life. And there is never a shortage of young people (and some not-so-young) who are ready to follow the demagogue of the day.
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