Meandering musings on being Muslim.
A scattered tour through the Islamic world.
Moghul, who gained acclaim for his memoir, How To Be a Muslim: An American Story, returns with a second exploration of Islam from his perspective as a Pakistani American author, professor, professional writer, and “thought leader.” Less evocative and introspective than his memoir, the author’s latest doesn’t advance a true vision so much as “describes what Islam has been and what it is, who its heroes are, what its big ideas are.” A hodgepodge of personal experience, Islam 101, and advice for “the ummah, the global Muslim community,” the narrative is disordered and often unclear. If there is a common theme, it is a call to a kinder, gentler Islam. Moghul decries the “religion of coldness, hardness, and distance” that he has too often experienced. Using pointed historical analysis, he questions the misguided political nature of Islamic cultures through the centuries. Based on the tenets of statecraft, Moghul calls for a new version of the “Caliphate of God,” but this concept remains vague throughout his text. “We can and must free Islam from the grip of religionized politics and politicized religion, returning it to what it was always meant to be. How to talk to God. How to turn back to God. How to instill life with everlasting meaning.” It’s an admirable goal, but the book lacks concrete action items. The author presents readers with an intriguing contrast, writing as a Muslim insider, explaining and deconstructing his religion, while at the same time making himself out to be an outsider who doesn’t fit easily into his religion and admits, “I cannot stay within the confines of traditional Islam.” Moghul also embarks on numerous confusing rhetorical side trips and employs a number of clumsy metaphors. He is knowledgeable about his subject, but he needs to refine his message and his method in order to reach more readers.
Meandering musings on being Muslim.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2465-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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