Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol: Order in the Chaos
Just read an otherwise hilarious time magazine review of Dan Brown's Lost Symbol: Order in the Chaos. I got stuck with the second para though: .... In other words, The Da Vinci Code recasts the history of Christianity into something that looks a lot more like the history of ... Islam, wherein an early schism took place between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. Could the book's passionate following in a predominantly Christian America express a secret, even unconscious sympathetic identification with Islam? Or a repressed desire for Christianity to have a less boring, more Islamic history — richer, darker, riven at its root by an exciting sectarian war ? Lev Grossman conveniently ignores the various established schisms in early christianity including the extermination of Arianism , and attributes "sectarian war" to Islam alone. What about the later Christian schisms and the related conflicts ? The roots of the Sunni-Shiite conflicts in Islam did not lie in as s...