Shattered Images: The Rise of Militant Iconoclasm in Syria

Fred A. Reed’s fifth book on the Middle East and “the wars of the Ottoman succession” traces the roots of Islamic fundamentalism, as currently enacted by Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, to the iconoclasts of sixth- and seventh-century Damascus.

The emergence of Iconoclasm, as sudden and overwhelming as it was catalytic, was at once the product of the forces released by the new social, political and religious teachings of the Prophet, and of their encounter with the Christian world at its far periphery.

They are forces that are quite alive and at large in today’s world, as the Western crusade against this latest prophetic dispensation of the Abrahamic tradition assumes a form both aggressive and invasive.

Shattered Images covers all of the major Islamic faiths in its search for the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements: the Shi’a, Sunni, Ismaili (and their connection with the Assassins) and many of the minor tributaries of Islam, including the “secular” (and related) Syrian Ba’as and Iraqi Bath parties.

As American tank turrets turn from Iraq and take threatening aim at Syria, current events increasingly confirm Reed as an astute expert on Middle-Eastern politics.

International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. Anatolia Junction, his acclaimed work on the unacknowledged wars of the Ottoman succession, has been translated in Turkey, where it enjoys a wide following. Shattered Images, which explores the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Islam, has also been translated into Turkish, and into French as Images brisées (VLB éditeur, Montréal).

After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir.

A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli, Empire of Desire, Reed has translated works by many of Quebec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers.

Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive. The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). Fred A. Reed passed away on February 14th, 2024 in Agar, Morocco.