In search of the broad range of Muslim views on Islam and society in the Arab world today, the author interviews an impressive array of Middle Eastern politicians and intellectuals, and sets their views in context of the region’s long past. Viorst, a staff writer for the New Yorker and prolific commentator on the Middle East (Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World, 1994), helps correct the West’s mistaken impression of theological uniformity among Muslim leaders. He divides Muslim thought into a triad of modernist, orthodox, and fundamentalist views. While modernists want to combine Western advances in science and politics with Muslim spirituality, and fundamentalists seek a purer Islam grounded in the early years of the religion, the orthodox hold all change suspect. Perhaps because their opinions are least known to Westerners, the modernist leaders, such as Ali Haroun of Algeria and Abdolkarim Soroosh of Iran, give the most memorable interviews. At issue is itjihad, or interpretation of Muslim law, and whether the process is fixed or closed, as the orthodox and fundamentalists hold, or open, as modernists teach. Viorst relates this question to another that centers his book: What caused the economic and technological decline of the Arab world that began in the Middle Ages? Several of the interviewees, including King Hussein of Jordan in a candid and affecting conversation, relate the decline to the fate of the medieval Mu’tazilites, the rationalist theologians who sought to balance Muslim faith with reason. After they fell out of favor with the ruling caliph, in the ninth century, no official partisans of reason arose to replace them—an absence “with which,” Viorst says, “Islamic civilization has lived ever since.” What Viorst calls his “fondness for the Arabs” shows in his account of the guiding lights he finds shining in the shadow of the prophet; his book spreads the light a little further.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-47691-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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