A brave and challenging message for 21st-century Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
A critical assessment of modern Islam.
In trying to shape his son’s understanding of Islam, Qureshi, author of The Broken Contract, began a journey of exploration that led him to realize how modern Islamic orthodoxy, on one hand, and Islamophobia, on the other, had warped perceptions of Islam into something it is not. The author introduces lay readers to the history of the religion, humanizes its original adherents, and clarifies the message of the Qur’an, countering the messages of ossified leaders and bigoted detractors. Qureshi uses much of the same historical and literary criticism techniques that theology scholars have used since the 1800s in examining the origins of Christianity. The author reclaims Muhammad, his contemporaries, and his immediate heirs from the fundamentalist viewpoint of perfection, clearly demonstrating their humanity and even frailty. He shows these early leaders as people capable of doubt and discord, as opposed to the infallible saints of legend. Similarly, the author demonstrates that the Qur’an and the hadiths of Muhammad have far more nebulous origins than many present-day religious leaders would allow. Qureshi recognizes that many of his explanations of Islam are not only unpopular, but even dangerous. “There is a lot of content in this book alone that if you were to publicly state in a Muslim-majority country, you could easily end up behind bars, beaten, or killed,” he writes. “There’s not a lot of breathing space there to challenge orthodoxy.” Yet Qureshi believes an open-minded approach to Islam is imperative for its message to resonate with future generations. The author uses an informal, even lighthearted, style backed up by solid research. Readers would be well served by following up this book with Mohamad Jebara’s The Life of the Qur’an, a deeper dive into the origins of Islam.
A brave and challenging message for 21st-century Muslims and non-Muslims alike.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781538189320
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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