An ardent but didactic devotional saga.
In this rapturous hagiography, the Sufi saint Sultan Bahu dazzles India with his spiritual radiance as he wins souls for Allah.
The author (Sufi Light, 2011) presents the story of the real-life Sufi mystic as a fictionally embroidered adventure set against the colorful backdrop of 17th-century Moghul India. The story opens with the exploits of Bahu’s father, Bazaid, a swashbuckling Muslim warrior who single-handedly assaults a fortress full of soldiers to cut off the head of the rebel Raja of Amarkot. Bazaid’s piety is exceeded only by that of his son, who’s recognized at birth as “the peerless jewel of the Crown of Oneness.” As Bahu matures under the tutelage of Sufi teachers and spirit guides, he experiences divine visitations, learns to walk on water and even flies to the Court of the Prophet in Heaven. Much of the book, however, recounts his more mundane journeys through the Indian countryside, where he heals the blind and the lame, turns clay into gold, and plows fields for weary peasants. Bahu’s greatest gift to the world, however, is his magnetic aura of holiness, which causes nearly every Hindu he encounters to convert to Islam. (At one point, the mere sight of a vial of his urine is enough to prompt infidels to embrace the faith.) Javid fills in some historical background with anecdotes about Mughal emperors’ bloody dynastic intrigues and notes on India’s complex religious landscape. He also weaves in Bahu’s mystical teachings on the oneness of all being, the priority of love over law, and the importance of direct, ecstatic communion with God through meditative trances. Javid conveys these precepts through aphorisms, snatches of poetry and, less felicitously, through Bahu’s quite lengthy disquisitions on Sufi doctrine: “In other words, names and qualities (attributes) are the self-determination of the essence and it is important to make a clear distinction between God’s essence, His names and qualities, and His acts.” Followers of Sufism will here find a heartfelt celebration of one of their greatest teachers. Nonbelievers will likely find the catechism heavy going, but Javid’s vivid portrait of an exuberant religious tradition and its cultural matrix may nonetheless pique their interest.
An ardent but didactic devotional saga.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2013
ISBN: 9781484917947
Page Count: 416
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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