Psyche, Science, and Society

In a bizarre example of Iraq’s creeping “Talibanization,” militants visited falafel vendors a couple of weeks ago, telling them to pack up their stalls by today or be killed.

The ultimatum seemed so bizarre that, at first, most laughed it off — until two of them were fatally shot as they plied their trade.

“They came telling us, ‘You have 14 days to end this job,’ and I asked them what was the problem,” said Abu Zeinab, 32, who was packing up his stall for good yesterday in the suburb of al Dora, a hard-line Sunni neighborhood.

“I said I was just feeding the people, but they said there were no falafels in Muhammad the prophet’s time, so we shouldn’t have them either.

“I felt like telling them there were no Kalashnikovs in Muhammad’s time either, but I wanted to keep my life.”

Why Baghdad’s falafel vendors should be blacklisted while their colleagues are allowed to continue selling kebabs or Western-style pizzas and burgers remains a mystery. Some suspect it is because a taste for falafels is one of the few things that unites Jewish and Arab communities in Israel.

It is, however, just one of many Islamic edicts to hit Baghdad in recent weeks, prohibiting everything from the growing of goatee beards to the sale of mayonnaise — because it is purportedly made in Israel.

Another group of traders to have felt the Islamists’ wrath is Baghdad’s ice merchants, who sell large chunks of ice for storing food and chilling drinks.

In a city facing constant power cuts and summer temperatures of up to 122 degrees, the service they provide is little short of essential. Yet in recent weeks, they too have fallen afoul of the claim that their product was not a feature of life during Muhammad’s time.

Akram al Zidawi, 19, an ice seller from al Dora, thought the threats were too ludicrous to be true — until it was too late.

“Two weeks ago, he came back home saying that he had been threatened by the terrorists,” said his brother Gassan, 32. “My mother begged him to quit the job, but he laughed. He thought it was impossible they would kill him. But they came back two days later and shot him dead, along with three other ice sellers nearby.”

The reason is that one cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth’s crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That “isostatic rebound,” according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the planet’s seismic plates slip catastrophically, and cause magma chambers that feed volcanoes to act like bottles of shaken seltzer.

That link has reared its ugly head in the past, especially during periods of rapid climate change such as the end of ice ages. When ice sheets retreated 10,000 years ago, for instance, Iceland experienced a surge in volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes in the Mediterranean, Antarctica and eastern California also seem to have been awakened by retreating ice.
When he analyzed 800,000 years of activity from about 50 volcanoes in eastern California (the age of rocks formed from volcanic ash can be determined by radioactive dating), Prof. Glazner found that “the peaks of volcanic activity occurred when ice was retreating globally. At first I thought it was crazy, but other scientists also found evidence that climate affects volcanism.” The likely mechanism: glacial retreat lifts pressure that had kept the magma conduit closed.