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  • Ararat

    Ararat
    Review by John Cornwell

    FT
    August 11 2008

    Ararat
    By Frank Westerman
    translated by Sam Garrett
    Harvill Secker £16.99, 244 pages
    FT Bookshop price: £13.59

    Alongside the allure of the Holy Grail, which enjoyed a frenzied
    revival with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, the quest for Noah's Ark ranks
    as one of the top will-o'-the-wisps in the history of religion. The
    Genesis story, shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has it that
    God, angry at human wickedness, flooded the earth. He saved just Noah
    and his family, along with all living species, by advising him to build
    a survival ark. According to the story, when the waters subsided,
    Noah's ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. The mountain, a volcanic peak
    5,137m high, lies within Turkey's borders ` a fact resented by Armenia,
    which claims the territory surrounding the mountain and nurses bitter
    memories of murderous Turkish oppression and annexation after the first
    world war. It has long been assumed by scriptural literalists that the
    remains of the ark are to be found somewhere on the mountainside.

    The Dutch author Frank Westerman is a student of mathematics and
    natural sciences, who was brought up as an evangelical Protestant. In
    2005, he embarked on a trip to Ararat to sort out his thoughts about
    faith, reason and the Bible. The result, Ararat, is an entertaining mix
    of memoir, meditation, history and travel, with a rather thin
    contribution to current squabbles over science and religion. The
    central, compelling theme is the fascination exerted by the ark, the
    discovery of which ` in the minds of Christian fundamentalists ` would
    give tangible credibility to the biblical account of creation and the
    flood. Westerman's vividly recounted stories of attempts to conquer
    Ararat's inhospitable slopes include the ascent of Ararat by the German
    scholar Friedrich Parrot, who reached the summit in 1829 despite a
    prevailing Armenian tradition that the mountain is unconquerable due to
    the presence of avenging angels. Parrot got to the summit and at least
    disproved that bit of taboo. Since then, there have been many more
    expeditions to the mountain, many hoping for sight of the ark, with a
    sudden increase following the end of the cold war. Down the years, odd
    bits of old wood have been claimed as ark relics. Among the celebrated
    `sightings' was a photograph of an object taken in 1972 by a satellite
    that has been interpreted by biblical enthusiasts as having the same
    proportions as the ark. Then there was the American astronaut James
    Irwin, who famously felt the presence of God on a space walk and was
    drawn to Ararat in search of proof for his faith. He found a few bits
    of rotting skis.

    Westerman tells us that on the way up Ararat (I won't spoil the story
    of his final assault), he realised that he had long ago rejected
    religion and put his entire trust in science. `Beyond the veil of the
    tabernacle there was nothing, and along Ararat's snowline were no
    angels with swords of fire.' Yet his conviction that synergies between
    science and religion depend on such activities as ark hunting is
    misleadingly superficial. Outside of fundamentalist creationists,
    scholars engaged on reconciling science and religion are more
    interested nowadays in philosophical questions, such as why there is
    something rather than nothing, than in chasing holy grails and bits of
    the ark.

    It is equally misleading to conclude with Westerman that absence of
    Ararat's ark conclusively undermines religion. All the same, Westerman
    concedes that the Noah story is a very good one and that good stories `
    despite being entirely fictional ` often contain strong elements of
    truth-telling. In an ominous warning that goes to the heart of a new,
    scientifically argued, flood story, he observes that one of Ararat's
    glaciers is showing signs of global warming and the coming rise of the
    oceans: a consequence of human abuse of the planet if not downright
    wickedness prompting divine wrath. Hence, in the dodgiest of religious
    myths, he concludes, there can be more than a grain of sober truth.

    John Cornwell is the author of `Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Riposte to
    `The God Delusion' (Profile)
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