A spirited, accessible defense for all believers.
A leading American imam urgently calls for reconciliation and understanding between Islam and other faiths.
Rauf has served as imam of the al-Farah Mosque in New York City since 1983. He is deeply involved in multifaith work with the Cordoba Initiative and very much in demand as a teacher on the finer points of Islam since 9/11 (What Is Right with Islam, 2005, etc.). He believes that all Muslims (and especially women) must reclaim Islam from the extremists around the world—Islamists and “radical jihadists”—who have co-opted the Prophet’s message and corrupted its benevolent intent. Events such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument in the mid-1990s that Islam “was the new enemy of the West” and, most significantly, the 9/11 terrorist attacks all helped demonize Muslims in the eyes of the rest of the country, obscuring what Rauf believes is shared by people of all faiths. He offers a knowledgeable comparative study of the “People of the Book,” focusing partly on the similarities between the three Abrahamic faiths: The first two commandments shared by all three exhort the believer to bear witness to the oneness of God and to treat others as you treat yourself, establishing the Golden Rule of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Rauf delves into the “bogeyman” of Shariah law, comparing it to the U.S. Constitution, which indeed has evolved as the world has changed and should not be viewed as static and literal. Unfortunately, writes the author, Islam has been deemed an anti-women religion, by culture and practice, when in fact the Prophet himself instituted revolutionary changes in the status of women, and his first wife, Khadijah, was a protofeminist. President Obama’s assertion in his 2011 State of the Union address that “American Muslims are part of our American family” gave Rauf new cause for hope that the hysteria around Islam has at last “bottomed out” and rapprochement can now occur.
A spirited, accessible defense for all believers.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5600-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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