Gharq Shudan-i Tamadun'hā: Persiska (Farsi) 1401

We must pay attention to Amin Maalouf's analyses: his intuitions turn out to be predictions, as he seems to have the foreknowledge of major subjects before they surface in universal consciousness. Twenty years ago he was worried about the rise of Murderous Identities; ten years ago the Disruption of the World. Today he is convinced that we are arriving at the threshold of a global shipwreck, which affects all areas of civilization. America, although it remains the sole superpower, is losing all moral credibility. Europe, which offered its people as well as the rest of humanity the most ambitious and comforting project of our time, is in the process of falling apart. The Arab-Muslim world is plunged into a deep crisis that is plunging its populations into despair, and which is having calamitous repercussions on the entire planet. Great “emerging” or “resurgent” nations, such as China, India, or Russia, are bursting onto the world scene in a noxious atmosphere where every man for himself and the law of the strongest reigns. A new arms race seems inevitable. Not to mention the serious threats (climate, environment, health) that weigh on the planet and which we could only face through global solidarity which is precisely what we lack. For more than half a century, the author has observed the world and traveled through it. He was in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, in Tehran during the advent of the Islamic Republic. In this powerful and comprehensive book, he acts as both an engaged spectator and a thinker, mixing stories and reflections, sometimes recounting major events of which he happened to be one of the rare eyewitnesses, then rising as a historian above his own experience to explain to us what successive drifts humanity has gone through to find itself on the threshold of shipwreck.