For all its limitations, a stimulating peek into an argument now rarely made.
A new translation of an Arabic treatise arguing that the Muslim world has fallen behind its European counterparts.
Arsalan’s work first appeared in 1929—this new translation by author Qureshi makes available, in accessibly lucid terms, a perspective largely absent from today’s public debate regarding the relationship between Islam and modernity. Arsalan, a Druze prince (1869-1946), posits that Muslims worldwide have suffered from a state of decline—that they are no longer as wealthy or politically powerful as the rest of the world; they no longer command as much respect or fear as they once did; and they no longer contribute to the advance of science. However, the author rejects the theory that this loss or this diminishment of cultural vitality—this “weakness and backwardness”—is the result of a devotion to Islamic religion or somehow an expression of the doctrinal demands of the Quran. In fact, Arsalan contends that the historical success of Islamic civilization was precisely because of its religion and that the faith has become corrupted, along with Muslim leaders, over time. As a result, he contends, the Muslim world suffers from general ignorance, cowardice and fear, moral weakness, and a lack of self-confidence deeply experienced as a “collective sickness.” Muslim conservatives are rigidly backward looking and timid about adapting to the modern world, the author argues, while Muslim progressives thoughtlessly imitate European culture, conflating modern sophistication with an abandonment of their religious identity.
Arsalan makes, in spirited and sometimes strident tones, the case that a rededication to the Quran is what Muslims need most. In his view, the Quran demands that Muslims work and sacrifice; faith and prayer are not enough. “So, it is possible for Muslims if they resuscitate their determination and work in accordance with what their Book urges to reach the level of the Europeans and Americans and Japanese in terms of knowledge and advancement while remaining connected to their Islam just as these others have remained connected to their religions.” Even the lack of technological advancement, as far as the author is concerned, is a symptom rather than the crux of the issue. If Muslims can recover their “determination, zeal and courage,” they can catch up. The author’s argument can be peremptory. He rarely if ever rigorously examines the possibility that there are elements of Islamic theology that conflict with the tenets of modernity, and the discussion of the Quran is less than searching. Also, there are significant issues simply sidestepped in his analysis—for example, the place of women in Muslim society. Furthermore, the author’s discussion, while never self-skeptical, can be vague. He has very little to offer regarding what will inspire the rededication to Shariah law for which he issues a resounding call, and he doesn’t provide much of an analysis of why, as he says, a spirit of sloth and a lack of self-assurance overtook the Muslim world in the first place. However, Arsalan does provide a fascinating assessment of the double standards by which Europeans and Muslims are judged, the former trumpeted as thoroughly secular despite their Christian commitments and the latter derided as fanatics for their Islamic ones.
For all its limitations, a stimulating peek into an argument now rarely made.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-39-841282-8
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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