A welcome introduction to a faith too little understood by those outside of it.
An adherent’s view of Islam, a religion too easily hijacked for ill political purposes.
London-based Husain (The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left, 2009, etc.), a former member of radical Islam who co-founded Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank in Britain, has lived and studied in Muslim communities in Syria and Saudi Arabia, where he was stunned to meet young people who “actually celebrated the misfortunes of the West.” This book is a response of sorts. The author writes, sometimes insistently, on what Islam is: a religion that recognizes one God and one prophet—along with holy people common to the Judeo-Christian Bible—while prescribing and proscribing many kinds of behaviors in daily life. All but one book of the Quran, he writes, begin with the formula “In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful,” which, he holds, “is intended to reflect in the behavior of the believer.” Shias and Sunnis, he adds, disagree on many things but hold one Quran to be sacred. Husain offers a careful explication of Sharia justice, which, he holds, “is far more complex and constructive than mere binary prohibitions and permissions”; followed in good faith, it is a systematizing program for ethical behavior. Against those who would take the Quran and Sharia to legitimate violence against non-Muslim people, Husain claims that they have no doctrinal justification. He rails against the kind of fundamentalism that allowed Saudi schoolgirls to burn to death in a fire because they were not wearing headscarves and robes, an act, he holds, that means that the first tenet of Sharia, “preservation of life,” had been violated. The author argues that mainstream Islam must isolate and denounce its enemies from within if it is to successfully resist outside accusations that it is inherently a religion of violence and terrorism.
A welcome introduction to a faith too little understood by those outside of it.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-639-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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