New York Rock: From the Rise of the Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB

New York Rock is music writer Steve Blush’s presentation of the city’s old music scene, from the 1960’s to around 2006. He describes himself as having spent a good deal of his youth working at his grandfather’s Lower East Side printer, at a time when the 1980’s bands like Talking Heads and Blondie were on the up-and-coming. The book is full of primary sources, mostly quotes from magazine articles of the time. Lou Reed, Richard Hell, David Johansson, and others reminisce about the “hot summer” years of Manhattan’s golden age. Wait, maybe that’s not right, more like a “trash-strewn, grimy, filthy, and vomit-smelling.” It was great for bohemian life, but throughout the book, there’s the constant pull between two aspects of city life; the run-down neighborhood that foster bohemian living, versus the desire to live in the city without being attacked.

    There’s a short chapter about the demise of Tin Pan Alley, just like the old New York jazz scene which ended decades later. The small venues of show tunes that came from Tin Pan Alley gave way to big musicals (see The Great Parade) which is how the small theatres of 42^nd Street became porn houses. The 45rpm record made recordings cheaper, and the sheet music business was no longer profitable. Now we have foreshadowing; the demise of a music scene would be repeated 40 years later, as CBGB’s would close the way others had gone before.

    Next comes the chapters on CBGB and that’s probably the mainstay of the book. Despite the small size, it lasted over 30 years (or longer, if you count it previous life as just another Bowery bar) so we might as well give Hilly Cristal credit for tenacity. Bob Gruen (who shot the iconic photo of John Lennon in a NYC tee shirt) describes the Lower East Side as a “seedy, Spanish, and scary fucking neighborhood.” You’d probably get mugged down there, so looking dirty, messy, scruffy, and crazy would make all the other crazies think you had no money. If you made it there and back alive, you were considered tough. It was art of the lore of the place.

    With each new generation, Blush adds new quotes. Rob Zombie, in a quote from 1986, says he hates being called a sell-out, because that’s exactly his intention, to get famous and rich. Lou Reed, who once claimed he took drugs to free himself, had since cleaned and sobered up. The people who disliked the gentrification of the neighborhood kind of gentrified themselves. You can’t be a long-haired crazy rebel when you’re 45 years old, you’d run out of things to rebel against. That’s why so many rappers become producers; they can’t rap about “the ghetto” once they start living in high-riced condos and gated communities.

    While New York Rock is full of well-researched material about rock music in the city, a lot of it was already covered in an earlier book titled Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, along with a book called Art After Midnight, about the East Village art scene of the 1980’s. If you want to learn more about this era, there’s a documentary called NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.

    I’ve met NYU students in $250 punk rock outfits who decry the “fake” music scene. They’ll trek from Avenue A to Driggs Avenue, looking for authentic punk rock shows, and they’ll end up crying into their $20 drinks. The punk rock bands they’ll find are either balding middle aged me or a strictly amateur act. My question is, what made them think they’d find it here in New York? When I ask, they’ll say they read about it in a book or saw it in a documentary. But the New York City punk scene is gone now, the Ramones are all dead for cancer or heroin. CBGB got forced out by high rent and the store that’s there now sells designer jeans. Hilly Crystal, the owner of CBGB, died of old age soon after the place closed. In the last ten years of its life, CBGB was only half full, and the last time I went there was back in 1998. Until the death of Joey Ramone in 2001, nobody cared about the place, and CBGB shirts were never seen until the years 2002-2007. After that it was forgotten again.

    In the book’s epilogue, Iggy Pop laments the whitening of New York City, but I say “so what?” Iggy Pop wasn’t even from New York, but Detroit, a city that had some great music in its history. He moved to Berlin because he thought New York wasn’t decadent enough (actually it was, but he was probably too stoned to tell the difference) which means he’s just another out-of-town transplant who thinks he’s the prince of the city. Well not in my book he isn’t. He’s just another celebrity with money who wants to enjoy the scene and leave when it’s no longer luxurious. That’s probably why the punk scene ended anyway; bohemian life is not possible when your money goes to (a) high rents, or (b) a drug habit.

The Arab of the Future 2

I think the lasting impression I’ll have from Sattouf’s graphic memoirs is the bleakness of his life in Syria. He makes the land look bleak, the Syrian people look bleak, and finally he makes his home life look bleak. The only exception is the part where he visits his mother’s family in France, at least that gives him a window of hope. But everything else in the book is like being stuck at the bottom of a hole.

    In the previous book, Riad Sattouf begins life as a cute well-spoken blond French kid, the son of a French woman and a Syrian Arab academic. First they move to Libya (lousy) and then Syria (awful) where they’re trapped in a society of dirty fields, dirty streets, abused kids, and animal cruelty. His father, a follower of Ba’ath philosophy and Pan-Arabism, is completely delusional. He turns down positions at British universities to take a low-level professorship in Syria, all because of his Pan-Arabist fantasy. Meanwhile, his wife just tolerates it. The people are filthy, the relatives are awful, and the local children are abused at home and take it out on other children. As for Riad, the kids at his school are either abused at home or spoiled rotten.

    One of the most prominent things about the story is the difference in Syrian and French child-rearing practices. In France, the toys are all constructive, while in Syria the toys are all plastic soldiers and toy guns. The plastic soldiers are meant to represent Israelis, with reptilian features and nasty expressions. They have a white flag of surrender in one hand, and a knife in the other hand, hidden behind their backs. In France, the children are cared for, while in Syria they’re neglected and beaten constantly. The boys in Riad’s school all have burn scars on their faces, and the teacher sends more time hitting the kids than teaching them. The only ones who befriend him are the dirt-poor kids who are usually on the receiving end of their parents (or the teacher’s) beatings. The children of his father’s wealthy friends and relatives, however, are spoiled rotten and treat him terribly. I can really relate to this personally, because my wealthy friends and relatives were like that too, it was always “stand over there and don’t touch my stuff.” Back in school, the best friends I had were all dirt poor, and they’d give you the shirt off their backs.

    Nepotism also comes into play in The Arab of the Future, because in Syria (and probably in most developing countries) the best jobs are given to people with connections. Professor Sattouf has a degree from the Sorborne in Paris, but he’s given a lower-level academic job because he’s got no insider to get him into a better post. He’s from a poor peasant family, and the only member with an education, but nobody in Syria cares. It’s one of the reasons that the country was a mess then and has become an even bigger mess now. Keep in mind that Syria’s army officers all got their jobs through nepotism, and it led to Syria getting beaten by Israel in every war.

    Artistically, Riad Sattouf book is great, because he makes use of colors to convey they mood. In the Libya sequence, everything is yellow, so you get the feeling of a scorched desert. France is colored blue, which makes everything feel calm and balanced. While you might find the blue to be depressing, keep in mind that the French are shown as having greater self-control than the Syrians, who are portrayed as borderline savage. The Syrian part of the story is red, because firstly the ground is red from the iron, and secondly, red conveys anger.

    I’ll sum up by saying that this is a great book about a horrible life. By the end of book #2, it’s clear that nothing’s going to get any better, because the father is delusional and the mother can’t put her foot down. She can’t be bothered to walk her six year old son to school, and the father can’t be bothered to buy his son the right clothing. There’s also a sad scene in the book, where the mother is fascinated by a cousin’s collection of gold (nine pounds of it), a gift from her rich husband. I was fascinated too, because this is a woman who gets dragged by her husband to a horrible country, where the food is bad and she has nobody to talk to. What reward does she get? Nothing! Her husband hasn’t given her anything but a leaky roof over her head.

Art Since 1900

Art Since 1900 opens each chapter with a momentous event in art history, and the first one is Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Using the events as a springboard, we see how modern art began (according to the authors) with new ideas on thinking. Radical styles in painting actually began years earlier in Paris, with Van Gogh and Gaugin pushing the limits of acceptability, but in this book it was Gustav Klimt’s open defiance of the establishment. Klimt’s dark subject matter is a proof, along with Freud’s work, that Vienna could be a place of rebel thinking. Preceded by artists like Gaugin and Toulousse-Lautrec, known for bizarre colors and strange subject matter, we can deduce that modern art was decades in the making.

    Another source of the change in taste, according to the first chapter, is the rejection of cliché. Years earlier, Auguste Rodin created his famous Balzac statue as a formless column, with no indication that the subject was a writer (Balzac wears a bathrobe, because he often wrote late at night.) Similarly, Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon removed the original plan to include a sailor (the client) and the medical student with a skull (memento mori). The chapter does not go into detail about the African symbolism in the painting, though it’s discussed in another essay titled Dread, Desire, and the Demoiselles.

    The second volume (it’s a two-book set) begins in 1945, when New York City and Chicago were becoming ground zero for the art world. Paris and Vienna were no longer the art capitals of the world, thanks to WWII driving the artists out, but keep in mind that years earlier, Paris and Vienna had pushed out Venice, Florence, and Rome. Where Paris was known for Chagall and Picasso, New York was now home to Pollock, De Koonig, and Mark Rothko, many of whom began in the WPA era. The authors make use of contemporary journalism, with sources from Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in the chapter on American abstract-impressionism, followed by realism making a comeback.

    I’d read a similar book, titled Art Since 1945, back when I was in college. It ended with the 1980’s artists like Harring and Basquiat (both of whom were proteges of Warhol) and Barbara Kruger. In every generation the textbook gets bigger, giving more attention to artists who, fifteen years ago, got no love. Take for instance Nicole Eisenman, whose 1996 works are included here, but would not have been included in this book in 2000.

    The Young British Artists are another movement that got more extensive coverage since their 1990’s debut. However, the book’s discussion of their origin is a bit slim, attributing them to Margaret Thatcher’s increased support for business, and the resulting British neuveau-riche class that sponsored Britain’s emerging artists. It is an accepted fact that early 20^th century Britain didn’t have millionaires like Guggenheim and Rockefeller who bankrolled modern art, so Britain’s artists were a bit slower in their emergence. It wasn’t until the 90’s that the new British upper class would sponsor artists like Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. I remember the YBA show at the Brooklyn Museum back in 2000, where Charles Saachi displayed his collection, aptly titled Sensation, as a way of introducing NY’s audiences to his country’s artists. It was like The Armory show 90 years earlier, where American audiences were introduced to Europe’s modern art. However, I was not ignorant of the YBA before the Saachi show; I’d seen the Chapman Brothers show at the Gogosian, and Whiteread’s pieces were displayed publicly back in 1994. Mayor Giuliani’s harsh criticism of Chris Offili’s Holy Virgin Mary With Elephant Dung only added to the publicity.

    The use of newsworthy events to begin each chapter makes sense, given that history will always be the biggest influence on art, and not the other way around. You have changes in economics, which leads to patronage, and then you have museums that can launch an artist’s career by giving him/her a platform. Not discussed in the book, though I would like to see it, is the subject of the artist neighborhoods in different countries. New York City had Soho, and I don’t know what the equivalent would be in London or Beijing. Chinese artist like Ai Wei Wei come at the end of the book, with a small entry, though Asian artists have been gaining ground for 15 years.

    I would read this book alongside Sanctuary (the studios of the YBA) and Dark Matter (how art has gone from commercialism to activism) in order to gain an understanding of the role of art in modern history. The authors make no effort to hide the fact that the scholarship is Eurocentric at the beginning, and US-centered after 1945. However, the USA had the Ashcan school in the years before 1945, with artists like George Bellows and his boxer painting, and then you had Edward Hopper’s streetscapes, but these guys don’t really come into play in the book. They were well-known in the USA, but rarely got any attention in Britain or Europe. I doubt that any of the artwork’s in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing are well known outside of the USA.

    Let me sum up by saying that this book can satisfy an entire course on modern art. It makes great effort to include non-US artists, though there’s little attention to artists from Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, or Africa. That could change, however, and I imagine this book will need a third volume in the next decade.

Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal

Gowanus Canal is a fetid, polluted, smelly waterway that runs through Brooklyn, and by all accounts it’s nothing but a drainage ditch. For years the locals complained about the stink, and nothing was ever done. The area was so unpleasant that the inhabitants deserted in droves. This book explores a question that a lot of local residents have; how did this useless canal become an object of fascination?

    Joseph Alexiou, a NYC tour guide, tells how the area went from a natural hunting and fishing ground to a farming community, an industrial zone, and now a high-priced neighborhood. Originally a treeless marsh, it was bought by Dutch farmers from Indian chiefs. As for the name, nobody knows how or where it came into being, it could mean “Thorny Bush” or “Sleep.” Throughout the book, the author repeatedly discusses the drainage problem of the area, and even uncovers unused plans, going back to the 19^th century, to cut a direct canal to the river, providing sewers as well. The problem was that the area is ungraded, meaning there’s no downhill anywhere. The area is flat, so gravity doesn’t pull the water towards the river. The first thing we learn of in this book is how the hurricanes cause the Gowanus Canal to overflow and dump sewage all over peoples’ basements.

    Alexiou spends some time discussing the actual neighborhood, but it gets a little repetitive. The area was industrial, and because of the stink nobody wanted to live there unless they had no choice. It was always a high crime area, and as soon as better housing became available, people left. The artists only moved into the area because it was convenient to Manhattan by subway. He ends the book with the Superfund designation, which would not have happened without the large number of wealthier people moving in, but so far hasn’t amounted to any real effort. There were some plans for cleanup back in the 1970’s, but the city was bankrupt at the time, and by the 1980’s most of the people had moved away.

    I’ll give Alexious high marks for his research. He dredges up old engineering plans, old maps, drawings from the 1800’s, and lots of information from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. As for the neighborhood, I don’t go there much myself, but the canal doesn’t smell as bad as I imagined. It smells more like a stagnant bayside area, not a sewer, and it’s even less smelly in the winter. But even if the Gowanus Canal stinks in the summer, keep in mind that the beautiful city of Venice doesn’t smell much better. It’s full of nasty stagnant canals, smelly for half the year, and flooding for the other half, and this is Europe’s priciest tourist attraction. By comparison, Gowanus is nowhere near that bad.

   Besides, the living cost in Gowanus is a lot lower. And best of all, you can get around by subway.

Generation Chef: Risking It All For a New American Dream

Things should be looking good for Jonah Miller. He’s an NYU grad, former sous chef, worked in restaurants since he was a teen, starts his own Spanish restaurant, has to open with a bang. The problem is that he’s starting an expensive restaurant with high prices, where the chance of failing is high. He can tell right away that the customers must have money; they have wide-gauge holes in their ears, which aren’t allowed at most day-jobs. In the first chapter you already get the feeling that he’s in way over his head, even though he clearly has the work ethic and the ambition. Now you see that things are not looking good; on the contrary, they look unsteady, and soon they look bleak.

   A little about the chef; obsessed with cooking from a young age, he got into it before cooking became hip, apprenticed in restaurant kitchens, lots of internships, and he was clearly an excellent chef by the time he opened Huertas. The problem, at least from the way the author puts it, is that he’s big on the cooking and short on the business sense. The first, and funniest chapter, is called “Stampede,” where the opening night makes them all crazy. He rebukes the head waiter in earshot of the customers, which pisses off the staff. Then customers start sending back medium rare chops because they’re too pink. Then they start asking for substitutions, which is always trouble, and the problem graduates to customers trying to make their own menus. You want to say “for crying out loud, enjoy what the chef creates, don’t dictate how you think the artist should paint the picture!” But this is a problem that a lot of restaurants have, where the customer demands customization. What chef Miller needs to do is follow Marco White’s example and toss these whiners out.

    The good thing about this book is that it shows you how the restaurant is as much about business as it is about food. Whole chapters are devoted to finding a place for the restaurant, then getting the alcohol license, building it, and dealing with the politics of the community boards. The first problem he has is that he doesn’t want to buy an existing restaurant, because he’s afraid the reputation will carry over. This is called a “vanilla space,” where you’re building it up from scratch. Then the landlord won’t rent until he sees the alcohol license, because it’s the only way he can guarantee that the lease can be sold. That means dealing with the downtown community boards, always hostile to alcohol-serving establishments. Then he has to find a contractor who can renovate in time and give him a good price. Then he has to deal with permits and ordinances. Everyone involved resents dealing with this 26 year old.

    I get the vibe that Miller started the restaurant out of resentment. He was clearly overqualified to be a sous chef, and I know from experience how frustrating it is when you don’t get promoted. I could really relate to how this guy would feel, I would be thinking “come on, I’ve proven myself, give me the chance to move up will ya!” But then it doesn’t happen, and he feels like there’s no choice except to strike out on his own. Maybe his real problem is that he confuses thinking with feeling? Following your heart and not your brain can ruin you.

    Generation Chef is one of many chef biographies that have come out in the last 15 years on the coattails of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Unlike that, and Marcus Samuelson’s book, it doesn’t have all the humor. Other chefs would rather be hired by someone else’s restaurant, rather than have to do everything themselves. The only thing Bourdain and Samuelson ever had to do was cook, at the worst they’d have to manage the kitchen. But Miller, he has to raise the money, find the place, get the license, find the contractor, get it built. He may be a great cook, but he’s no builder, and definitely not a businessman. It almost reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, where he questions the professor about building a factory. “Why build?” he asks, “when you can lease it for a buck and a half a square foot?” He’s right on that one, the building costs can deplete the entire investment.

    The story is a little confusing and hard to follow. The introduction, with the opening night debacle, should’ve been restricted to one page. There’s also too much back-and-forth in the story, so you get distracted by trying to keep things chronological. It might have done better as a multi-article series in the New York Times.

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

   Before I discuss this book, I’d better remind you (no, more like warn you) that the great adventurers were all upper-class Englishmen. Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Burton, George Orwell, they all had upper-class manners and fancy schooling. Maybe their families didn’t all have money, but they weren’t Cockneys. They were all well-bred and educated, like Lawrence who was an Oxford grad, and Churchill, who went to Sandhurst. Churchill, however, was something of a “poor relative” of nobility. He was related to the Duke of Marlborough, born at Blenheim Palace, and even though the family were nobility, they were financially poor. They were always needing money to keep their mansion going, and his ancestors all had to marry rich American heiresses in order to eat. I wonder if these men, since they were too upper-class to become doctors, had to become adventurers in order to prove themselves?

    What always fascinated me about Winston Churchill was that he was born to privilege, yet he managed to graduate from the Sandhurst military school and handle all the rigors of army training. Then again, Sandhurst is more luxurious than West Point, and it’s not an engineering school, so passing isn’t as much of an effort. He didn’t buy his commission like the officers of old, so we can guess he’d be qualified to lead troops. But at the same time, he didn’t really have to pay his dues in life; he was always guaranteed a place at the top table.

    Candace Millard believes that Churchill’s military career, from India to Africa, was just a carefully engineered stunt to promote himself. She starts with his service in India, where he chose a conspicuous gray horse, and constantly put himself in danger so his superiors would see him. He wasn’t that great a soldier by the way, because his men usually ended up getting massacred. In India he was an Englishman in charge of native troops, and their lives were not considered to be worth as much as his. He wouldn’t be faulted for getting them killed, and whatever heroics they did on his behalf would be ignored. The cards were always stacked in his favor.

     One could call this a book about the younger Winston Churchill, kind of like a “before they were stars” biography. But it’s really about his self-promotion and how he had a talent for drawing the spotlight on himself. After each deployment, he wrote a book about it (India, Sudan, South Africa) and used the publicity to get himself elected to Parliament. Though not expressly mentioned, Churchill’s exploits could easily have been fabricated. His escape from a Boer prison camp could’ve been embellished (he might have bribed a guard) and there may have been people helping him that he didn’t credit. Maybe he stole a horse to help in the escape? As for his heroics in South Africa, much of the fighting was done not by Englishmen, but by natives in the British employ. Mohandas Gandhi, then a (mistreated and abused) lawyer, organized an all-Indian regiment of stretcher bearers, and he, as the regimental Sergeant, required them to save soldiers of both races. The usual British policy was to save only the English and leave native troops to die.

    The writing is good, thorough research gives it credibility. However, the story isn’t especially interesting, not his military career nor his escape. I’m sure his lecture tours, with lantern slides and battle trophies, must have enthralled the London audiences. But the details are not fun to read about. Much of the “escape” was spent hiding in a coal mine and being smuggled across borders in a coal cart. In his “daring escape” it’s actually the civilians that are risking their lives to get him out, not the other way around. The wealthy classes, who sat in rapt attention, must have gasped when he brought out a Pashtun scimitar. I can just imagine the look on their faces when he said “and then, the screaming bearded savage charged at me, yelling “Alahu Akbar” with murder in his eyes.” But let’s keep in mind that brave Lieutenant Churchill would’ve been first in line to be evacuated, leaving the Sikh and Gurkha soldiers to die on the battlefield. Same thing with the Boer War, except that Sergeant Gandhi’s stretcher bearers had to (at Gandhi’s insistence) carry out both the English and the natives.

   Churchill was a self-promoter, no doubt about that, but I guess it’s like the saying goes; history is written by the victors, and to the victors go the spoils of war.

Festivalland by Cleo Campert

 The carnival atmosphere of Cleo Campert’s work is a sharp contrast to the forest on the cover. Throughout the book, he photographs hoards of young people flocking to outdoor concerts all over the Netherlands. For each of the photos of the concerts, he provides a photo of the same space, but without the people.

Ever since Woodstock, and perhaps more so since the breakup of The Grateful Dead, there has been greater effort to replicate the spirit of these events. In the USA we have the Burning Man festival, held in the Southwest deserts, among other events. But in Festivalland, Campert’s photographs are from a much cooler climate, and they often take place in the woods.

Campert began his career by photographing nightlife, but in this book all the action takes place outdoors. There’s a picture of Zwarte Cross, which resembles Coney Island more than a music venue. Perhaps that’s the point of these photographs, that outdoor pop-up concerts have taken on more of a carnival atmosphere than before. The juxtaposition of the festival goers against the deserted forests also creates a more natural feeling, one that the attendees are uniting with the natural environment.

Cleo Camptert’s photographs recapture the spirit of Woodstock, in his perfect combination of the music venue and natural landscape.

Introduction to Islam By Carole Hillenbrand

    Carole Hillenbrand writes of how Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, but also writes how the crucifixion is omitted. The Quran hints that Jesus wasn’t physically killed, rather that he was taken to heaven while still living, similar to Enosh and Elijah. Joseph is also a prophet to the Muslims, and the story of him and Zukilyah (Potiphar’s wife, not named in the bible) is used as an example of resisting temptation. She leads him through multiple rooms, each one decorated with erotic artwork, and in the artwork provided, he wears green clothing, symbolizing purity.

    Introduction to Islam, from Thames & Hudson Publishers, is a book that creates a realistic, balanced portrayal of one of the three great religions, both venerated and maligned at the same time. This book is clear in that local customs always influence Muslim practices, as in the chapter on prophets. The author includes a 14^th century illustration from Iran, depicting Mary and the angel, where she sits in a Buddhist cross-legged pose. Most of the Persian artworks have Chinese influence, in the faces, the colors, and the animals. Rashid-al-Din’s World History has a painting of Jonah and the Great Fish, using Chinese elements such as the fish as a thrashing carp. The style of the splashing water also has similarities to Chinese brush painting.

    The author doesn’t mince words in discussing negative aspects of Islam. For instance, no authority in a Muslim country would tolerate blasphemy or disrespect towards Mohammad, and even in tolerant Muslim Spain, Christians could not speak of him negatively. She discusses Satanic Verses and the backlash to Rushdie’s book, and the death threats, book burnings, the ban on its sale. She does, however, note that most of the men who burned the book had not read it. Next we have the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy, where a depiction of Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban sparked violent protest. But the author states that the violence was the work of radicals, who are (according to her) only 7% of all Muslims. The most destructive protest was the Muslim boycott of Danish food.

    Diversity, in the form of the Sunni-Shiite split, is discussed, with good explanations of both philosophy and tradition. Hillenbrand also writes a few pages on Islam in Europe, and how the French Muslims are mostly from North and West Africa, while Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey, Britain’s Muslims are from India and Pakistan, etc. We also learn about the Sufi orders, and how their practices are different depending on whether you’re in Africa, Egypt, or Turkey.

   What disappoints me about this book is that Islam in China and South Africa are left out. I’ve seen depictions of Cape Town Muslims, descended from Indonesian captives (known as Cape Malays) and the men and women pray side by side, not with the women behind the men. It would be interesting to hear Arab Muslims view on this. I would also have liked to read about how the Chinese Muslims in Taiwan go about preserving their customs in a non-religious society.