Liberty In Islam Is The Liberty To

Osama Bin Laden, The Saudi-born Revolutionary Who Is Believed By Most Arab And Iranian Observers To Be The Inspiration Of The Attacks In New York And Washington, Is The Best Known Of The Islamic Militants To Have Emerged In The Past 20 Years And The Least Difficult To Fathom.

Europe And North America, We Are Told, Are Less Dependent On Energy-intensive Heavy Industry Than In The 1960s And 1970s. It Seems We Squeeze More Gdp Out Of A Barrel Of Oil Than In Those Benighted Days.

The Rise To Prominence Of The Saudi Novel In Arabic Is The Great Man-bites-dog Of Recent World Literature. Saudi Arabia Is A Country Without A Free Press, Where European Styles And Forms Are Distrusted And Where The Female Half Of The Population Became Literate Only In This Generation.

By Pouring Money And Goods Into Devastated Regions, Foreign Aid Workers Sometimes Compound The Disruption And Debauch The Survivors.

Cause And Effect, The Riddle Of All History, Is A Particular Devil In Financial History; And Never More So Than Today, Where Entire Classes Of Security Are Collapsing Not On Public Exchanges And Stock-tickers But Because There Are No Markets To Establish Prices This Side Of Nothing.