A Carolingian King

When last we encountered Christopher Hitchens, he was lecturing a pride of mangy alleycats on the hygienic virtue of hair-of-the-dog. We offered him some spare change; he accused us of accomodationism, threw his bottle at a passerby, wept, retched, and began reciting the Magna Carta in the original gibberish. Now he has returned to tell us that we might assuage our besotted consciences by sending books to Iraq. Can it be long before we find him weeping like Sally Struthers and cajoling our guilty souls toward redemption "for just ten cents a day." My favorite paragraph:

As anyone who has read the Arab Human Development Reports will know, the Arab region—which at the time of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was one of the world centers of humanistic learning and philosophy—is in a profound crisis of intellectual unfreedom. It boasts of no great centers of study; it translates pathetically few books from other languages and cultures; it is prone to waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books are actually burned. Thus the attempt to reverse this trend and to lay the foundation of a liberal and cosmopolitan education for the next generation of educated Iraqis is of the highest importance from every conceivable point of view.

"Every conceivable point of view." Yeah, except for the points of view that predominate during the "waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books are actually burned." Does Slate have a copy editor, or is that too, like, old economy?

Back in the day, of course, the Abbasids and the Ummayids were all up in Europe's shit, their flourishing, cosmopolitan culture having figured that it might as well camp out in Iberia for five hundred years. If Hitch had been alive in those days of yore, he'd have been lining up to praise Charles Martel, defender of barbarous medieval Christianity against the liberating armies of the educated East.