Very interesting, insider account of how Islamic militancy operates in the UK. The basic form is the same as practiced by most cults and fringe political groups: target dissatisfied young people, start with open discussion, attract them with simplistic universal answers to complex questions, and in-group status, encourage scapegoating of others (Jews seem to work pretty well for both religious and political groups).

However, the specific details of how they work are interesting. British Imams tend to be relatively powerless: it's mosque committees that are worth infiltrating. A variety of innocuous names are given to groups, presenting them as normal debating societies to the authorities. The groups try to appeal to moderate moslems at first by campaigning for popular things like prayer rooms: after that they move gradually towards extremism.

As has been pointed out, there are a number of splitting / merging sub-groups: this seems to be our chief hope.

Most of this isn't particularly new. The most worrying thing is that according to Husain most of the public bodies (like the Muslim Council) have been taken over by Islamists who are much more extreme than the UK moslem population as a whole, and these groups are negotiated with and taken as representative by the government.

Overall, an interesting and important book, well worth a look.

What I'm Reading 2
Partway though TTC course The Story of Human Language. Careful what you wish for, you might get it: I've complained about some TTCs being too basic and just covering what I already know before. This is a 36 lecture course on Linguistics and just covers that subject.

Doesn't do much on Chomsky. Goes through how linguists work, and how the major language groups have evolved in some detail. Now he's going through several lectures on dialects.

Has some interesting examples like Ukrainian for instance. When the Russian capital was in Kiev Ukranian was seen as standard Russian. WHen the capital shifted it began to be seen as a peasant dialect of Russian. Now it's seen as a language in its own right.

He also says there should really be one language called Scandinavian spoken in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Annoyingly though, he keeps going in very heavy-handedly against "prescriptivism, repeating many times that it's "natural" for languages to change.

Now that's fine, but let's be consistent here: he also talks emotionally about the tragedy of languages dying out. Now that's also a perfectly natural process, so why attach emotional importance to one but not the other? If wanting to maintain the use of "disinterested" is Canute-like unnatural conservatism, surely wanting to preserve Welsh or Cornish or Catalan is equally unnatural?

Also he undermines his own case somewhat by admitting that written languages when there is widespread literacy tend to be more stable precisely because of the teaching of a standard form: therefore the endeavour to maintain meanings cannot be entirely futile.

Also, he admits at different points that he has difficulty in understanding Shakespeare, and has trouble with the differences between formal and informal French. If language changes can be kept relatively slow, then language users will have a larger body of literature to read, and will find it easier to travel.

Later lectures are about differences between the formal language we use for writing and the informal language we use for everyday speech. (Everyday speech uses a smaller vocabulary, simpler structures) He conflates formal speech with written speech, saying that we only use formal language (lecture, political speech, court speech) verbally because we have learned how to do it in writing. To support this he gives examples both of cultures without a written language, and of early writings from a mostly oral culture. He uses Genesis 1 as an example, saying that the original has short, simple sentences just like everyday speech.

I'm not totally convinced by this. For one thing, it seems to me that illiterate or near-illiterate cultures have more in common than just illiteracy: I suspect they tend to be hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculturalists, living in small communities without much specialization. Maybe they use simpler speech because that's all they need, rather than because you need writing for complexity.

Or suppose that as soon as a culture starts finding complicated things to say, it invents a way to start recording these complicated things.

Wish he wouldn't keep using the word "natural" to describe everyday language and the changes to an oral-only language. That's the trouble with these recorded courses: I would so love to rip into him at closing questions but I'm helpless.

He has mentioned one really cool thing that exists in some-languages and we should totally import into English . They're called evidential markers: it's part of the grammar that every time you make a statement of fact you have to append how you know it: whether through seeing it yourself, hearing it, through gossip or whatever. So every statement has to have a kind of source. Want.

He also uses "unnatural" to describe the creeping of Latin forms into English grammar, which he traces to the earliest English grammars by [look up in PDF]. Again, I don't think he's being quite consistent here. He also quotes other old attempts to change or restrict the language which never took hold; so you can't just attribute it to the malign influence of these two ignorable people. Elsewhere he talks a lot about the influence of bilingualism on language change, and how elite groups are more influential than lower groups. Now for centuries the elite and most literate class of English speakers were bilingual in English and Latin: there doesn't seem to be anything unnatural or unusual in the fact that over that time period bits of Latin grammar started creeping into English.

Overall though, these are minor complaints. I've delved into another language book and this seems to be a pretty thorough introduction to linguistics. Though it's much more opinionated than most such courses, it does seen to keep you informed of both sides of most arguments. Overall, well worth a look.

What I'm Reading 3
Also read a Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral, about a high school athlete turned businessman whose daughter becomes a terrorist in the Vietnam War period.

Really liked the last two novels of his that I read, (The Plot Against America and I Married a Communist), but was very disappointed by this one.

The characters don't seem to gel at all. Athlete/businessman "Swede" Levov seems like a bland, dull non-entity. There might be a culture gap problem here: maybe USians are supposed to be shocked and fascinated to find that these people have feet of clay and are not purely heroic role models, whereas UKians are trained to believe these guys are probably arseholes from the start. However, as I recall pretty much every high school athlete character I've seen on US TV, in US movies or in US print seems to have been a jerk of some kind, so it can't be that much of a revelation to them. Maybe there are intricate subtleties to Levov's conformism that I'm not equipped to discern. But it seemed to me he's just far too dull a character to base a book around.

The terrorist daughter Merry seems to be a complete cypher, not a plausible character at all. One minute a delightful daughter, the next she metamorphoses into a cartoonish harridan, shrieking the most obnoxious and hurtful insults she can at here bewildered parents. At a guess, this is another one of Roth's cat-swipes at his ex-wife's family: he's blamed their chubby daughter for their marital problems before.

The character weaknesses might not matter if there was a decent plot, but there isn't: just hundred of pages of high-level rambling while not a lot happens, until an implausible coincidence of timing brings everything to a head at a dinner party at the end.

The overall setup: high-school-athlete-turned-businessman-encounters-sixties-radicalism seems very reminiscent of the middle two Rabbit books by John Updike. Loved those, but this might just be a half-baked attempt to poach on his territory.

Overall recommendation: avoid. No real redeeming features here.

Review, review, review. Oddly, just found that this one's won a Pulitzer.

What I'm Reading 4
Finished the short book Sociolinguistics: an Introduction to Language and Society by Peter Trudgill. Short book introducing the subject, this edition revised in 1983. Doesn't really require any previous knowledge of linguistics, though a little is helpful.

Goes through the basics of how language varies according to social class, ethnic group, sex, context, geography and so on. Quite informative, though it doesn't go into a lot of depth. Only slightly dated, which seems most evident in the UK sections: interesting to see they think it would be absurd for the news to be read in a regional accent, which started to happen soon after that.

Tone is a bit dry though since it's an academic book. I found it interesting but most people wouldn't.

What I'm Reading 5
Read A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. Short coming-of-age novel about a rebellious teenager in a Mennonite religious community . Not bad, has some nice Douglas Coupland style angst-and-pop-culture stuff, but despite being warned by the author not to expect a good ending, it still seemed pretty weak. There was kind of a half-resolution, but it still seems hard to believe that the mother and eldest daughter have made no attempt to contact the younger daughter, and I got the impression that that's not for any good reason.

Still, interesting as a look inside religious fundamentalism. Not sure how autobiographical it was.