Since Adam's Fall

Daniel Swift looks at a new book that takes a tour in search of ecumenical understanding between Christianity, Islam and Judaism

Where God was Born: A Journey by Land to the Roots of Religion. By Bruce Feiler. William Morrow. €24

There's an engaging scene about halfway through Where God Was Born when Bruce Feiler, who has travelled to southern Iraq to find the Garden of Eden, meets Azzam Alwash, an irrigation engineer who has vowed to reflood the marshes where the Bible suggests Eden may have been. Genesis appears to place it at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near Nasiriyah; Saddam Hussein, fearing the marshes could afford a hiding place for rebels, had drained them, ruining the ecosystem. Now, with inevitable American support – what could be finer PR than restoring the Garden of Eden – Alwash's foundation is working to irrigate the area. “As an engineer, I never really believed in Paradise,” he tells Feiler, but continues, with a wink: “I know a little about marketing”.

We don't know where Eden was. As Feiler himself notes in his earlier book Walking the Bible, the first place mentioned in Scripture that experts are relatively certain about is Mount Ararat, several chapters after the account of Eden, and that is because it happens to have the same name today. Even then, this similarity doesn't necessarily tell us much, except that the name is a very old one – one mountain looks very much like another, especially at a distance of several thousand years. Paradise, like all the places mentioned in the Bible, has always been a stronger metaphor than map reference.

This is unfortunate for Feiler, who has built a career on the assumption that human and divine geography correspond. In his books Walking the Bible (2001) and Abraham (2002), and again in Where God Was Born, Feiler – accompanied by a wise and wisecracking Israeli archaeologist named Avner Goren – visits biblical sites and rereads the scriptural episodes that took place there. He explores the sewers of Jerusalem to discover how David entered the city; he flies over the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock in an army helicopter; he marvels at Persepolis in Iran and the ziggurat of Ur in Iraq. He bounds through his escapades like Indiana Jones, armed with scriptural exegesis in place of a bull whip.

There is an urgency to Feiler's quest, for ours is an age, as he writes, of a “new world war over God”. The wars of our generation are animated by religious sentiment, and he is rightly horrified to see in the world around him violence committed in the name of God. His solution is a nobly moral one. “If religion is to be preserved as a moral force in the multifarious world of today”, he writes, “we must rediscover the legacy of interaction and accommodation”, and wherever he goes, he quite literally seeks the common ground shared by Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Feiler's book is nothing if not topical; perhaps it is more topical than even he understands, for he appears not to recognise the minefield onto which he is stepping. As he gestures toward the religious and political struggles that dominate the front pages – “between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq, between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism” – he is often blind to how sensitive those terms have become.

The journey begins in a helicopter as Feiler flies over Israel and the West Bank with an Israeli general and war hero of the 1967 and 1973 wars, as well as Israel's invasion of Lebanon. You don't have to be Edward Said to appreciate that the general might not be the ideal guide for a tour in search of ecumenical understanding between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but Feiler too often appears to be unaware of such implications. Arriving at the Western Wall he looks around “to see if any Palestinians were preparing to throw stones”, and while that might be an understandable fear, it's an unnecessary comment, as is his question to one archaeologist, “Do you think the Muslims are trying to wipe out Christian and Jewish history?”. Tehran, Feiler declares, is “the dead end of freedom”, but not unique: “Middle Eastern capitals are riddled with backwardness and rife with anti-Western rage”. It seems less and less clear whether his book will make a contribution to rediscovering “the legacy of interaction and accommodation”.

The contradictions in Feiler's book are nowhere more apparent than when he turns to the current American-led occupation of Iraq. Having posited a global war “between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism”, Feiler is forced to defend the invasion as a nobly executed cause. “The US government has a legacy of being sensitive to history in wartime”, he purrs, but this claim is so extravagantly prone to controversy that he himself contradicts it shortly afterwards as he observes that “the most avoidable mistake war planners made in Iraq was underestimating Iraqis' pride in their history”. And having insisted that the Western coalition is “pluralist”, he restricts his interviews with actual soldiers to two chaplains who lead psalm readings before battle and one sergeant who, when asked for his reasons for being in Iraq, replies simply: “It's religious. It's biblical”.

There is a great deal of shared ground, of course, between the Koran, the Christian Bible and the Torah, yet the overlapping narratives reach sharply divergent conclusions. It would be possible to walk away from a close reading of Genesis with a radically inclusive world view: utopian and forgiving. But Scripture can also fuel great hatred, and therein lies its power. God, of course, was not born in any particular place but Feiler, fixated upon the where, can't always see the why or the how.

Daniel Swift has written for The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator.
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