Though surely controversial and certainly just the tip of the iceberg, this accessible book provides interesting food for...
The mysteries and the esoterica of Islamic history and culture.
Knight (Why I Am a Salafi, 2015, etc.) begins with a scholarly explanation of why “magic” cannot be fully defined outside the confines of a European past; he concludes that, at best, it is a construct of any given culture and time and thus a fluid concept by nature. “Having performed the necessary deconstruction of categories and displayed critical self-awareness, now I’m going to do whatever I want,” he writes at the end of the introduction. “Maybe this book should just be called Weird Shit in Islam.” Despite that moment of levity, Knight presents an erudite and wide-ranging exploration of what might be popularly called “magic” in Islam. His subject matter spreads across centuries and continents. Knight begins, however, with the text of the Quran, in which he locates and discusses the Arabic term for sorcery. The term takes on a variety of meanings, ranging from satanic implications to mere superstitions. The Quran, as a book steeped in the power of the supernatural, has often been seen to have powers and properties that might be viewed as magical—e.g., the power to heal. Understanding Islam as a religion that cannot be studied apart from the cultures with which it has been in contact, Knight moves on to discuss astrology in Islam, a facet that often stemmed from contact with other religions. Similarly, the Quran mentions a figure named Idris, whom many trace back to the Hebrew Enoch and even to the Greek god Hermes. The author rounds out his book with a discussion of prophecy as projected through dreams and a look at Islamic power motifs in more modern black culture. Knight delivers a thought-provoking introduction to a little-examined subject, albeit a hard one to define.
Though surely controversial and certainly just the tip of the iceberg, this accessible book provides interesting food for thought.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17670-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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