An accessible primer to Islamic ideology for the uninitiated.
A meticulous, scholarly introduction to Islamic literalism, specifically designed for a Western readership.
Butta’s (The Jewish People and Jesus, 2010) latest effort attempts to provide a “one-stop introduction for people who want to know more about Islamic literalism.” Literalists, he writes, fundamentally interpret the Quran as an authoritative guide for all human affairs; some even adhere to a dangerous, politicized version of Islam. The book is intended specifically for curious Westerners who have little knowledge about Islamic studies. To this end, the author strives to present his study in an easy-to-understand style. He examines sections of Quranic text in chronological order, and this innovation alone makes the Quran considerably more accessible. For each section, Butta selects a key text, analyzes it from a theological and historical perspective, and then offers an illuminating “Western analysis,” which considers how each teaching guides Islamic literalists’ interaction with the Western world. For example, one startling account addresses how Islamic antipathy to non-Muslims may be rooted in the belief that “Allah left non-Muslims in error and led them astray so non-Muslims might feel terror and fear.” The prose is always lucid, and the scholarly analysis, though painstaking, is genuinely easy to follow. Butta often makes clear his own misgivings about fundamentalist Islam (“One must wonder if Muslim women would still choose Muhammad over Jesus of the New Testament if they could read the New Testament and make up their mind without fear of being beaten or killed.”), and readers might have been interested in hearing more about “strictly cultural Muslims who reject Political Islam.” Nevertheless, the book’s overall presentation is reliably evenhanded and rigorous.
An accessible primer to Islamic ideology for the uninitiated.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477295298
Page Count: 512
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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