Something begins. You don't know how long it will last or where it will go. Many beginnings fail of their purpose. Others merely disappoint. But now and again the beginning comes to something, something good.
Such has been Alan Johnson's online review of books, Democratiya. In the summer of 2005 it announced itself to the world with its first issue. This week, 10 issues later, it's still going strong, having established a record of quality and consistency that testifies to the intelligence and energy of its editor (a friend of mine, I am bound to say, and once upon a time, in what now seems to me like a remote era, a student of mine too). The latest number is, as usual, full of interest. There are more than 20 items, ranging across a wealth of subjects. See for yourself and read as you will.
I pick out one passage only - from Ophelia Benson's review of a collection by Ibn Warraq, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out. Citing an anti-apostasy declaration from an ultra-conservative Tehran daily in 1986, Ophelia writes:
A more wrong-headed idea is difficult to imagine. To define changing one's mind about any particular set of ideas and truth claims as treason, betrayal, and disloyalty is to forbid thinking itself. Making the human being's ideological commitments a permanent, irrevocable matter of loyalty is to impose ossification, dogmatism, conformity, and plain mindless stubbornness on an entire society, or, worse, an entire global 'community of believers.'To insist on fixity of belief is, indeed, a most appalling betrayal of the human spirit, of the genius that belongs to our species.