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THE MALADY OF ISLAM

Name: THE MALADY OF ISLAM
Author: Abdelwahab Meddeb
ISBN: 0-465-04435-2

by Abdelwahab Meddeb & translated by Pierre Joris & Ann Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2003

For those seeking a window onto the Islamic world, though of tertiary importance at best.

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“If fanaticism was the sickness in Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in Germany, then surely fundamentalism is the sickness in Islam.”

So writes homme de lettres Meddeb (Comparative Literature/Univ. of Paris X—Nanterre) by way of an opening salvo in a polemic sure to irk the ayatollahs. Fundamentalism, he argues, has taken hold of the Islamic world since 1979—the year of Khomeini’s triumphant revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, events more than coincidentally linked—for any number of reasons, not least of them the decline of secular education and the proliferation of “semi-literate” followers of “candidates who claim the authority to touch the letter.” Other factors, by Meddeb’s account, are the general withering away of the Islamic world as an important place vis-à-vis the rest of the globe, a marginalization that began at least as far back as the 15th century and the transference of what he calls the “world-capital” “ever further away from the Islamic space”; the repudiation of Enlightenment-influenced attitudes on such matters as the liberation of women and universal suffrage; the failure of the Islamic world to develop any kind of meaningful, modern democratic tradition, and the failure of revolutionary leaders such as Atatürk of Turkey and Bourguiba of Tunisia “to rid themselves of the despotic tradition they had inherited”; and the rise of a strange kind of American imperialism that has done too little to remove the conditions conducive to creating “the man eaten away by resentment, a candidate for terrorist and insurrectional fundamentalism.” Meddeb’s analysis is provocative if touched by flights of rhetorical confoundedness of the sort beloved only by French philosophers. The payoff: Meddeb’s crystal-clear assurance that “al Qa’ida is destined to fail just as the Assassins failed . . . just as every similar movement throughout history has failed.”

For those seeking a window onto the Islamic world, though of tertiary importance at best.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2003

ISBN: 0-465-04435-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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HARD CHOICES

by Hillary Rodham Clinton ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2014

Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...

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Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.

If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.

Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….