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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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