ON THE MUSLIM QUESTION

Name: ON THE MUSLIM QUESTION
Author: Anne Norton
ISBN: 978-0691157047

by Anne Norton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2013

Is there a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington maintained, between the Muslim world and the West? Norton’s response...

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What to do about the Muslims? It’s a question, writes Norton (Political Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, 2004, etc.), that non-Muslims have been asking, and the answers have been few.

If the question of a religiously observant Jewish enclave within European societies weighed heavily on thinkers of the Enlightenment, then the matter of a religiously observant—not to say fundamentalist—Muslim enclave within the secular West has excited much recent argument, principled or not. Norton observes, for instance, that for many thinkers, including the late Christopher Hitchens, the “Muslim question” is really the question of religion writ large, with the added twist of whether a secular society should be expected to tolerate those who would dismantle it if they came into power. The governments of the West, writes the author, “hesitate to include [Muslims], hesitate to extend them the rights and privileges of citizenship.” That is less true of the United States than of Europe, and if Muslims in this country suffer “discrimination, surveillance, detention, and imprisonment,” by Norton’s account, the worst offenders have been European nationalists such as Holland’s murdered agitator Theo van Gogh. While those nationalists have reacted to provocations such as the rioting in the Muslim world in the wake of apparently anti-Islamic cartoons in a Danish newspaper, then, Norton remarks, it has to be recalled that almost all the violence that ensued was visited by Muslims upon other Muslims in Muslim countries. Norton sometimes channels Slavoj Zizek in a knotty and not entirely satisfactory way, as when she offers a sort of semiotics of space at Abu Ghraib: “The Iraqis are confined in shackles, in cells, in a prison, in a country they cannot leave, whose boundaries they cannot close.” Mostly, though, she offers a sympathetic, tolerant and evenhanded view of events.

Is there a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington maintained, between the Muslim world and the West? Norton’s response will be of interest to students of geopolitics and Islamic studies.

Pub Date: March 28, 2013

ISBN: 978-0691157047

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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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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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

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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.