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enlightenment by book review
Feb. 8th, 2012 10:47 amThe Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Once in the course of a religious discussion, I defined God as "the being worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims." The evangelical Christian I was talking with replied that Muslims do not worship God, but a demon called Allah.
This book is addressed to people who suffer from that level of belligerent ignorance. The author (she is an American of Muslim Indian origin) not only points out that "Allah" is no more a different being from "God" than "Dieu" is, she spends most of the book repeating over and over that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and certainly all the ones you'll meet as your neighbors, are just people practicing their own religion the way you practice yours. She's quite straightforward about what that means to her as an individual.
To a Muslim, the terrorists are no less weird outliers who misrepresent the religion they claim to follow than the Klan, who used Christian panoply to justify their terrorism. The only difference is whether the media treat them as exemplars of their religion. (But the author weakens her point by also citing terrorists who happen to be of Christian origin but aren't claiming Christian justification for their acts.)
The author convinces, or should convince, that the Muslim next door is not planning to murder you in your bed. But the book is also useful for many of us who weren't suffering from any such delusion, to gently inform us how little we know about Islam. It's a major religion with as complex a history, theology, organization, and structure of customs as Christianity or Judaism, but I discovered here that I know almost nothing about it. (I'd never known of any Islamic holidays besides Ramadan, for instance.) You'd need a handbook to learn, and this isn't it, but at least it should humble those who didn't realize their ignorance.
I was particularly appreciative of the discussion of the Nation of Islam (the Elijah Muhammad/Farrakhan group), which I'd always found puzzling. The author says it's just a farrago of notions put together from Islam, Christianity, and various other sources, and not adhering to the Qur'an at all, and thus not actually Islamic whatever it may call itself. (Malcolm X's break with the group, she says, was when he'd realized its nature and decided he wanted to be an actual Muslim instead.) It strikes me that this is the equivalent of the "Jews for Jesus": they call themselves Jews, but they aren't. She also explains the place of sufism, which is not a branch of Islam but a mystical practice. Another parallel she doesn't draw: it's Islam's kabbala.
Nevertheless the book is not entirely reassuring. ( Read more... )
Once in the course of a religious discussion, I defined God as "the being worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims." The evangelical Christian I was talking with replied that Muslims do not worship God, but a demon called Allah.
This book is addressed to people who suffer from that level of belligerent ignorance. The author (she is an American of Muslim Indian origin) not only points out that "Allah" is no more a different being from "God" than "Dieu" is, she spends most of the book repeating over and over that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and certainly all the ones you'll meet as your neighbors, are just people practicing their own religion the way you practice yours. She's quite straightforward about what that means to her as an individual.
To a Muslim, the terrorists are no less weird outliers who misrepresent the religion they claim to follow than the Klan, who used Christian panoply to justify their terrorism. The only difference is whether the media treat them as exemplars of their religion. (But the author weakens her point by also citing terrorists who happen to be of Christian origin but aren't claiming Christian justification for their acts.)
The author convinces, or should convince, that the Muslim next door is not planning to murder you in your bed. But the book is also useful for many of us who weren't suffering from any such delusion, to gently inform us how little we know about Islam. It's a major religion with as complex a history, theology, organization, and structure of customs as Christianity or Judaism, but I discovered here that I know almost nothing about it. (I'd never known of any Islamic holidays besides Ramadan, for instance.) You'd need a handbook to learn, and this isn't it, but at least it should humble those who didn't realize their ignorance.
I was particularly appreciative of the discussion of the Nation of Islam (the Elijah Muhammad/Farrakhan group), which I'd always found puzzling. The author says it's just a farrago of notions put together from Islam, Christianity, and various other sources, and not adhering to the Qur'an at all, and thus not actually Islamic whatever it may call itself. (Malcolm X's break with the group, she says, was when he'd realized its nature and decided he wanted to be an actual Muslim instead.) It strikes me that this is the equivalent of the "Jews for Jesus": they call themselves Jews, but they aren't. She also explains the place of sufism, which is not a branch of Islam but a mystical practice. Another parallel she doesn't draw: it's Islam's kabbala.
Nevertheless the book is not entirely reassuring. ( Read more... )
