Exceptional reimagining of Islam.
Manji takes readers outside the boxes of “moderation” and “multi-culturalism” to boldly tackle the problems with modern Islam.
In the wake of her 2005 book The Trouble with Islam Today and PBS documentary Faith Without Fear, the author looks toward an optimistic fix for Islam’s woes. She finds this remedy in the ancient Islamic practice of ijtihad, a “tradition of dissenting, reasoning, and reinterpreting.” Focusing on seven simple yet challenging lessons she has learned about reform, Manji urges readers—whether Muslim or not—to challenge those who hide behind social constructions like “moderation,” which perpetuate a culture of violence and intolerance. She makes it clear that Islam must be separated from Arab culture, which idolizes family and collective honor above individual integrity. Going further, however, Manji calls for a reinterpretation of Islam itself by Muslims to bring readings of the Qur’an into a 21st-century context, decrying the Muslim fear of outside cultures while ignoring Islam’s own severe cultural problems. Muslims, she writes, must stop having “high defenses against the Other and low expectations of ourselves.” She also calls upon non-Muslims to stop wringing their hands over respect for another culture and to remember that certain things, such as honor killings, wife beating, etc., are simply and universally wrong. Throughout the book, the author quotes from e-mail communications with critics and allies alike, many of which echo the resounding hatred and striking fear that many Muslims live with daily. Her writing is emotive, penetrating and sassy. Readers of all backgrounds should be struck by her assertion that, “A sovereign Creator isn’t threatened by our self-knowledge; only the Creator’s uptight gatekeepers are.”
Exceptional reimagining of Islam.Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 9781451645200
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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