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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with I
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Islam: The Religion and the People |
Author: Bernard Lewis
Published: 2008-08-29 |
List price: $21.99
Our price: $14.95
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As of: January 05th, 2009 11:24:01 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A basic book on Islam
Islam: The Religion and the People was pretty basic but did reasonably well in imparting the culture of Islam. It did not delve too deep into the religion, but just deep enough to give the reader a little insight to better understand the culture. It was not so much about the religion as it was the culture that evolved out of the religion. It was not too interesting either- it was hard to finish the book. I would recommend this book to anyone that needed a basic introduction into the culture of Islam. A pronunciation guide would have been a nice addition.
 Great for High School Libraries
"Religion is too important to be left to the theologians." This book is an excellent primer to explain the nature of Islam to those unfamiliar with the basics about the history and principles of the religion. It has an excellent list of terms in the back that is very useful. Another wonderful feature is the inclusion of examples of Islamic humor that periodically break up the book. This is basic enough to be excellent for high school libraries and is shorter and easier than Reza Aslan's book "No God but God" and much shorter and easier than Hans Kung's "Islam".
Very good book, but I would have like more information
I was very interested in reading this book. After I received I waited until I had the time to really concentrate on it. I know quite a few Muslims personally (I buy my fresh lamb from a halal butcher) and I wanted to know more about this important religion. More is what I got, but not as much as I expected.
The history of Islam is rich with wars, intrigue and controversy. Little of that is covered here and what was made me feel as though I was reading a text book for high school students instead of a book written for adults with curious minds. I also felt that I did not learn much more about Muhammad the man. All in all a good book not it was not as deep as I had hoped for.
A Great Primer
This is the book to get if you don't know much about the Islamic faith and want to be able to follow what you read in the op-ed pieces in your newspaper or weekly magazine. The history, tenets, and practices are described in amazingly well for such a short work. The book is a bit dry, but short enough to push through with just a bit of effort.
This book is not inflammatory, just provides information about the religion and people of Islam. Definitely worth the time and money!
I highly recommend.
All the best,
Jay
 Letting Islam have it both ways
A couple of paragraphs buried deep in an Associated Press news report on December 12 explains why everyone should read "Islam: The Religion and the People," and this review will explain why, having read it, everyone should be wary about what it says.
The story concerned an American admiral's proposal that the way to deal with Somali pirates would be to attack them in their bases -- a correct assessment, successfully used since the time of Julius Caesar -- and it included reactions by the Ambassador of Indonesia to the United Nations, Marty Natalegawa, who, unlike many Indonesians, does not use one name.
He told reporters the U.S. plan could conflict with the U.N.'s Law of the Sea treaty, which sets rules and settles disputes over navigation, fishing and economic development of the open seas and establishes environmental standards. "I still have a problem with this onshore business," he said. "We have a regime that governs the law of the seas . . . and we cannot simply willy-nilly and as we please set that aside as a situation dictates."
Of course, it was not willy-nilly, the action was authorized in a Security Council resolution, like the one that allowed the U.N . and the United States to come to the defense of South Korea in 1950. To understand what Natalegawa meant, you have to add 1 + 1 + 1 to get 3.
Natalegawa is a Muslim + the pirates are Muslims + Islam denies the right of any infidel to try a Muslim = obstructionism.
Of course, as a practical matter, millions of Muslims living in secular states do submit to infidel courts.
But before they get to that point, they first have to have renounced another tenet of Islam, which says that a Muslim cannot live under an infidel ruler; even if conquered, he must remove himself to a Muslim state as soon as possible.
All of this somewhat contradictory background explains why Indonesia opposes effective measures against African pirates and why the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is wrong to suggest that sharia could be used to settle matters of personal status among Muslims living in the United Kingdom. True, Jews in the U.K. have government-recognized religious personal status tribunals, but there is a big difference: Nothing in Judaism requires its adherents to deny the jurisdiction of gentile governments.
Bernard Lewis has been putting out articles and short books trying to educate kafirs (defined in the useful glossary) about Islam for 60 years. He had one in press just before Sept. 11, 2001, and has issued several since, including "Islam: The Religion and the People." Although the book may be an eyeopener for people who have never made any effort to learn about the history or practice of Islam, there is nothing here that has not been presented by Lewis often before.
And that includes the whacking big conceptual contradiction that lies at the heart of all Lewis's polemical books about Islam. He tries to let the Muslims have it both ways.
Despite the contention of Islam-haters that the religion is mired in the 7th century, it has evolved in dramatic ways. Even Iran has a parliament. The prohibition against living under infidel rule was so strong as recently as 1800 that when the Ottoman Sultan wanted a minion to become his ambassador in Paris, he had difficulty finding one whose religious scruples would allow him to visit.
Lewis, by trade an ancient historian, seems to think that there is some ideal ancient Islam by which present-day behavior can be assessed as Islamic or not-Islamic. Thus, he condemns suicide bombing (as who but a Muslim wouldn't?) as not sanctioned by any ancient text or practice. Maybe not, but it is a full part of modern Islam, sanctioned by the most prominent religious leaders.
Migrating to England from Pakistan to make more money is equally unIslamic by ancient standards, but while Lewis explains the historical background, he does not exclude the migrants from the comity of Islam the way he does the bombers.
From an Islamic perspective, both would, in olden days, have been seen as equal sinners.
More to the point for infidels expected to live with Muslims, the religion is a package deal: Islamic supremacy, as Natalegawa says in his indirect way, is always part of the deal.
It is the joy of reading Lewis that he restates the obvious: that even revolutionary and supposedly atavistic regimes like Iran adopt institutions like parliaments that have not the slightest tradition in Islam; or that from the point of view of Muslims, their borders have run up against not just Christians but Hindus, Buddhists and pagans. But then, having stated the obvious, he goes along and draws the same lame conclusions of those who cannot even see the obvious.
The endless and tendentious quarrel about toleration is the most significant example. The notion that Islam is a religion of peace is too silly to spend time on, when its founder led armies to impose his faith. It is true that for the first thousand years or so of Islam, its practitioners were usually (but not always) more tolerant than the Christians they met were, although that has not been true since around 1700; but it is also true that during the 1,400 years of Islam's confrontation with the east and south, Islam was always and still is more intolerant than the Hindus, Buddhists and pagans it met there. Universalizing, salvationist monotheisms must be intolerant.
Islam evolves. The salafist bombers may not have any tradition in ancient Islam, but that does not mean they are inauthentic today. If any Muslims are inauthentic, it is the ones who opted to migrate into the west. Lewis spends a lot of time in this book (and even more in some of his others, like "From Babel to Dragomans") explaining that until about 200 years ago, it was universally understood by Muslims that they were not allowed to live under a non-Muslim government.
Muslims are what Muslims do. That is what is so disappointing about "Islam: the Religion and the People." There is not much about people here.
In particular, while Lewis has always been an apologist for Islam, he has not shied away from reporting what cannot, anyway, be denied: that in 2008, by any measure, Muslims are hungrier, sicker, poorer, more ignorant and more restricted than any other large body of believers. Yet he never makes any effort to explain the other side of that situation: Why people whose religion delivers so little in the way of material benefits are so fanatically resistant to change.
In Arabic, the word for change is bid`a, and "an innovation is assumed to be bad." So what are the immaterial attractions of Islam, such that its adherents will kill kafirs and backsliding Muslims to maintain their -- to all outward appearances -- miserable material status? You won't find any hints in Lewis.
If it's superficial nuts-n-bolts about Islam -- why do they make such a fuss about pointing in the right direction to pray? -- this little book will suit. If you want to know why millions of them, many illiterate, will heartily endorse the murder of a novelist writing in a language they cannot understand, you will not be any clearer after spending a few hours with Lewis. (It is not obvious what his co-author Buntzie Churchill contributed to the book; there is nothing here Lewis has not written before without her.)
You will not even get an idea of why Muslims consider the world is against them, although they so obviously do think that. The history of the guinea worm is instructive here.
Guinea worm is a hideous parasite which infects almost solely Muslims. It is not very difficult to control, and in fact there was a time, a few years ago, when western do-gooders thought that guinea worm would go the way of smallpox: It almost became the first human parasite to be driven to extinction. Muslim intransigence defeated their efforts, as it did the effort to eradicate polio. The significant point here is that it was kafirs, who almost never get guinea worm, who devotedly worked to save Muslims from it. There is no comparable historical example of Muslims working devotedly to save kafirs from anything. In fact, as will become evident from reading "Islam: the Religion and the People," the concept of doing good for non-believers would be inconceivable to a Muslim.
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