"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Cromwell, Jews who remember Nebuchadnezzar, Basques
who remember Hannibal, all like yesterday.
Ibn Battuta's world was similarly polyglot, and
divided into "nations," too, run by mamelukes and
moghuls who doted on tossing dissidents to packs of
ravenous man-eating dogs. Muhammed Tughlug, the
radiant Sultan of Delhi, punished rebels (very loosely
defined) by having them cut in half, skinned alive,
and/or tossed aloft by trained elephants with swords
strapped to their tusks. It was bad news to cross
these worthies, and yet their borders meant little,
and ethnicity even less. A believer was a citizen
anywhere in Islam, his loyalties

devoted to
Civilization--the sacred law of the Prophet--and then
to his native city. Ibn Battuta was not a "Moroccan"
countryman or a "Berber" ethnic, but first a learned
Islamic scholar, and second a man of Tangier.
It may soon be much the same in Europe--a vague
attachment to "Western democratic ideals," while one's
sense of patriotism is devoted, not to one's so-called
country, but to Barcelona or Amsterdam, Marseille or
Berlin. (Cities, mind you, with populations every bit
as large as entire nations of the medieval world.) At
this period in history, the aging institution of the
nation-state is being torn from above and below--below
by ethnic separatists, above by the insistent demands
of multinational commerce and the global environment.
Is there a solution for the micronations--
besides, that is, the dark horrific example of the
"Final Solution?" Maybe. Let the Lithuanians "go"--
give them "freedom"--but with no local currency, no
local army, no border tariffs or traffic control, no
control over emigration, and with the phones and faxes
open 24 hours a day. What is left? City-level
government, in a loose ecumenicum.
A good trick, if anyone could pull it off. It's
contrary to our recent political traditions, so it
seems far-fetched and dangerous. But it's been done
before. Six hundred years ago, in another world . . .
The fourteenth century, what Barbara Tuchman called _A
Distant Mirror_.
In Alanya, a city of medieval Anatolia, Ibn
Battuta had his first introduction to the interesting
organization known as the fityan. He was invited to
dinner by a remarkably shabby man in an odd felt hat.
Ibn Battuta accepted politely, but doubted that the
young fellow had enough money to manage a proper
feast.