A panoramic yet nuanced investigation into the lives and dreams of Muslims living in Europe and the US. LeBor, a correspondent for the Times of London, first became interested in Europe's Muslims during his stint in the war zones of Bosnia. This volume brims with both the curiosity and the openness that the Jewish LeBor brings to his investigative journey and to the possibilities of Muslim contributions to the West. LeBor travels to a diverse group of communities that share similar questions about Muslim participation in the larger culture and polity. This book is divided into separate chapters on wartime Sarajevo, the rebirth of Islam in Bosnia, Muslims in London and in the heart of Yorkshire, the predominantly Algerian Muslim community of France, Germany's second generation of Turks (``Euro-Turks''), new possibilities for modern Islam in Turkey, and Muslim political activism in the US. In each, the narrative is dominated by lengthy citations from extensive interviews conducted with a broad spectrum of Muslims from each country. LeBor, with a conversational tone and a deft touch, succinctly explains the different aspirations within each community and the tensions between Muslim modernists and radical Islamists that he encounters everywhere. Interviewees are often poignant and eloquent, and LeBor succeeds in giving voice to their dreams and frustrations. He reveals more of his own visions of Western Islam, both past and present, when discussing Europe's ``forgotten Islamic heritage'' and Western Muslims' future. Here LeBor points to the achievements of Islamic Spain and its commingling of cultures and religions as a model of multicultural coexistence. With the millions of Muslims now permanently living in the West, he argues, Muslims and non-Muslims alike must learn to coexist. A timely and accessible look into how both Western Muslims and their neighbors are dealing with the political, social, and spiritual issues raised by an increasing Muslim presence in the West.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18109-4
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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