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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with U
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Understanding Islam and the Muslims: The Muslim Family and Islam and World Peace |
Author: T. J. Winter
Published: 2002-01-01 |
List price: $7.95
Our price: $7.95
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Buying copies for friends, relatives and co-workers
Finally, a book uninfluenced by ideology. This book, like so many from Fons Vitae, gives an unbiased view of religious beliefs. The book is quick and concise. Winter and Williams are careful to point out that cultures within Islam vary from country to country, and give a few examples of differences within Islamic denominations. This book is not about Wahhabi Islam, nor about the perverted beliefs of Osama bin Laden. It is an attempt to dispel the widespread ideology that bin Laden's perverted beliefs are held by many Muslims by giving a general overview of the vast majority of Muslims.
 The True Islam is the Islam that is Practiced Today
This book is premised on a terrible fallacy. The author attempts to present Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance, relying on passages from the Quran and other ancient Islamic texts.
The first problem, of course, is that the Quran, like most religious texts and astrological forecasts, is replete with vague and contradictory passages that can be cited by anyone for just about anything, and is frequently cited by critics of Muslim to creach conclusions diametrically opposed to those of the author Winter.
More fundamentally, what the Quran says is utterly irrelevant. The Quran means whatever the majority of Muslims today think it means. What is relevant is the Islam that is in actual practice today--the beliefs and politics of Muslims worldwide in 2005.
Polls show that more than 90% of the populations of Palestine and Pakistan believe the 9/11 attacks were justified by the United States' policies toward the Muslim world in general and Palestine and Israel in particular. The percentages are almost as high in most other heavily Muslim countries. These are hardly the beliefs of a peaceful and tolerate religion.
However noble its roots (which is subject to question), Islam today bears little resemblance to the Islam of centuries ago, having been hijacked and perverted on a world-wide scale by the Saudi-backed Wahabbism and the brainwashing of children, and creation of psychotic assassins, in the madrassas--the so-called "religious schools"--started and funded in many Muslim countries by the Saudis.
What kind of religion can create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cold-blooded psychotic killers? Not one of peace and tolerance.
People like this author Winter love to dismiss the Muslim terrorists and their millions of supporters and apologists as an alleged "extremist" or fringe group. They are indeed extremist, but they most assuredly are not a fringe group. To the contrary, they represent the vast majority of Muslims worldwide today. Sadly, the peaceful and tolerant Muslims--and there are many--are a small and decreasing minority.
A good read. Very informative. And very true.
Mr T. J. Winter is a highly accomplished scholar and internationally recognized translator of Islamic texts. In this book he has produced an open and informative description of real Islam as practised by the vast majority of its adherents.
This book should be welcomed by intelligent non-muslims (and uninformed muslims for that matter), who prefer *not* to be informed solely by the loud cries of the violent and misguided minority. (In the same way that an intelligent observer of Chritinianity would not want to form their opinion of it on the basis that Hitler and Mussolini were Catholics and that they were partially supported by the Vatican).
To the reviewer (Seth J. Frantzman) who said that people who really want to understand Islam should read the Quran instead of this book: one can only reply that a) any intelligent and unbiased reader who really manages to deeply read the Quran will at once be understand the beauty of Islam, and b) Mr Frantzman's statement the Quran enjoins people to "beat your wife" is a complete fabrication. It is, however, sadly typical of the detractors of Islam that they attempt to use the force of lies and fear to undermine it. Note that the reviewer did not say which chapter and verse this line can be found (the common practise when quoting from the Quran), simply because the line does not exist in the Quran.
But anyway, this is a very good book. To be read by open-minded individuals who want to understand.
A concise and colorful survey of the landscape of Islam
This is an updated and expanded edition of probably the most popular, and certainly one of the best, concise introductions to Islam. One of the main contributors to the text is T. J. Winter (a.k.a. Abdal-Hakim Murad), who is a brilliant Oxford-educated British convert to Islam. The high-quality photographs in this thoughtful work are enriched by a very balanced, informative and insightful text. I know of no other book that so vividly demonstrates the ethnic, geographic, architectural, spiritual and artistic diversity of the Muslim World better than this wonderful little book. Likewise, the text succinctly explains Islam as the majority of Muslims understand it in a very rich and scholarly, yet easy to understand, way. This booklet of ninety-six pages touches on a myriad of topics and is in a question and answer format. The questions are well thought out and the answers are brief, and since the text doesn't shy away from the more difficult and touchy questions that are often asked, a lot of important ground is covered relatively quickly. Some of the featured questions are: "What do Muslims believe?", "What do Muslims think about Jesus?", "Why does Islam often seem strange?", "What is the Muslim conception of peace?", "When can a Muslim conduct an armed jihad?" - and many others that get right to the point of addressing issues that are often the subject of popular myths and misunderstandings. If you want a quick introduction to Islam that explains the religion as Muslims understand it, then this reasonably-priced book is the one for you. In our day and age, where militant distortions of Islam are far too often in the headlines, this book is essential reading for anyone yearning to find out what most Muslims really believe. A fair person should not judge Islam by the misguided acts of fanatics whose actions fly in the face of how the Qur'an has been collectively understood by over 1,400 years of Godfearing and qualified Muslim scholarship. When one wants to learn about a religion, any religion, one should seek to find out how it is understood by the moderate mainstream of the majority of its followers, not small angry and violent sects which really are a relatively new modern phenomenon.
In regards to the previous reviewer, from "Jerusalem, Israel", who calls this book a "huge piece of propoganda [sic]", well this is seemingly because it shows the true and positive side of a religion towards which he is obviously rather hostile. I wonder if he considers books that present a moderate and accurate view of his own religion to be "propoganda [sic]"? He asserts that the book is "misleading" and that it contains "outright fabrications", but doesn't provide any concrete examples. His ignorance actually leads him to come up with a couple of fabrications of his own. He claims that "the Qu'ran [sic] orders its followers to kill the entire non-beleiving [sic] world", although the Qur'an contains no such command. Even though the Qur'an, just like the Old Testament, does sanction warfare based on certain conditions (which the book rather unapologetically explains on pages 69-82), it nowhere advocates indiscriminate violence, taking the law into your own hands, nor the killing of non-combatants. Suffice it to say that historically, Muslim scholars have been advocates of the highest moral and ethical standards, thus they've rejected such facile and simplistic interpretations of the Qur'an, which is not meant to be read (nor misread) by unqualified literalists. In his haste to cast aspersions on the Qur'an, the aforementioned reviewer conveniently omits the fact that the Qur'an grants a special protected status to Jews and Christians as "People of the Book" (which the book explains in some detail on page 83, complete with a picture of "Egyptian Jews in Cairo"), thus his claim that it advocates genocide against them is nothing short of slanderous. This outrageous charge is rather ironic coming from an adherent of Judaism, since the Old Testament is replete with calls to violence, including God-ordered massacres of women and children. Before he writes any more diatribes about the Qur'an's alleged advocacy for genocide and violence, I think Seth J. Frantzman needs to put that fact in his hermeneutical pipe and smoke it.
This same Islamophobic reviewer makes a similar blunder when he claims that "the world is divided into two parts by the Quran, the Dar Al-Harb(the world of war) and Dar al-Islam/Salaam(world of islam/peace) [sic]", since this division is nowhere to be found in the Qur'an. While it is true that some, but certainly not all, medieval Muslim jurists perceived the world in this bipolar way, this was not the only view-much less the majority opinion-amongst a rich diversity of Islamic scholarship. Such distorted statements by Mr. Frantzman make me wonder whether he's actually even read the Qur'an, much less this book. I suspect that rather than striving to conduct his own balanced and scholarly research, he's just uncritically accepted the rubbish that hostile sources have spoon-fed him about Islam.
Although this book addresses various topics in order to expound upon and clarify Islam's view of women with questions such as: "Does Islam consider men superior to women?" (page 34), "What does the Quran teach about Eve's involvement in the fall from Eden?" (page 36), "Does Islam have female role-models?" (page 36), "Are women excluded from any Muslim religious practices?" (page 37) and "Why do some Muslim women wear veils?" (page 52), it seems that the hostile Israeli reviewer completely ignored what was presented seemingly because he didn't want facts to get in the way of his distorted claims. Indeed, the Qur'an gives women rights that they only obtained during the past century in the West, although many non-Muslims aren't aware of this because their information about Islam mostly comes from a biased media rather than from informed scholarly sources. In his review, as soon as he finishes misrepresenting the text of the Qur'an, Seth J. Frantzman goes on to distort the text of this booklet by declaring that it "pretends that women are 100% equal in all muslim countries", although the book makes no such claim. While this book eloquently documents and explains the rights that the Qur'an gives to women, it no where asserts that these rights have been perfectly and properly implemented in the Muslim World. In fact, the book explicitly says (page 54) that "there can be a great difference between theory and practice of Muslim teaching in some Muslim societies". Typically, the main error underlying the misguided assertions of those who attack Islam is failing to distinguish between the actions of some Muslims on the one hand and the pristine teachings of Islam on the other. Being fallible human beings, Muslims have failed to live up to the ideals of their religion in the same way that Jews, Christians and others have often failed to live up to the ideals of theirs. The Islamophobe's claim that Muslim men "have no such modesty laws" should also be understood in this light, since (believe it or not) there are modesty laws for men in Islam, although many Muslim men are either unaware of them or apathetic about them (which unfortunately seems par for the course on many subjects these days). Mr. Frantzman, however, should be aware that there are modesty requirements for Muslim men since the book clearly states (page 24) that both "men and women are expected to dress in a way which is modest and dignified", which again just begs the question of whether he's actually read this book. Overall, it's fair to say that in the Muslim World today Islam is not the problem, but rather the problem is ignorance and apathy about what it really teaches (as opposed to ideological and cultural distortions of these teachings).
Overall, I feel that the review by a person who is obviously laboring under a heavy payload of misinformation and bigotry is quite telling. In spite of his wild assertion that one could be "brainwashed" by reading the book under review, it seems that he is the one that has been brainwashed by slanted anti-Islamic propaganda (and that's how you spell it Mr. Frantzman). However, in spite of his hostility, I do agree with his conclusion that if you want people "to convert to Islam" one should "definetly [sic] pick this up", since this book has certainly been a positive tool for sharing the teachings of Islam with a great many people and bringing a number of them into the fold of the pure and universal monotheism of Abraham.
In light of the fact that this reasonably-priced book provides a quick, balanced and vivid way to get an accurate picture of what Islam teaches and what Muslims believe, I consider it essential reading and recommend it very, very highly.
Scholarly yet approachable
Written by well-known Western scholars from Cambridge University and the College of William and Mary, this book presents the basic elements of the faith such as the Five Pillars and the Muslim view of Jesus and Mohammad. The book also goes into some detail about gender issues, marriage and family, and the laws of warfare in Islam and directly addresses controversial issues such as women's rights, polygyny, and the validity of terrorist acts according to Islamic law. Furthermore, it presents the orthodox view of Islamic law as it has been maintained for centuries by the vast majority of classical Islamic scholars, not a watered-down liberalized version that has no relation to the past nor that of the small extremist, non-law-abiding minority which usually makes the headlines.
The book also offers the reader a peek into the incredibly diverse cultures of Muslims -- from Taiwan and China, to Central Asia, to Africa, to Bosnia and Denmark, and to the US (among many others) -- through stunning National Geographic-calibre photographs which by themselves are worth the price of admission. The book also goes beyond the usually boring list of basic by relating colourful anecdotes about Muslim warrior-queens and other leaders, particular mosques, and gorgeous arts & crafts from around the Muslim world.
This book will not be useful to people like the previous reviewer, Mr. Seth Frantzman from Israel, who seek to confirm their stereotypes and demonize an entire faith for their own political purposes. Judging from his review, it is not even clear that he read the book, as it answers virtually all of points he raises even in its slim form. Yes, there are modesty laws for men, and in traditional Muslim societies men cover their heads as well. No, the burka (covering one's face) is not required by law -- it is a cultural phenomenon, and it is not worn by the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslim women. Covering the face is actually prohibited in Mecca. The Dar al-Islam/Dar Al-Harb distinction is a medieval distinction, and it refers to the places where Muslims may freely practice their faith and where they may not-- meaning that virtually the whole world today is considered Dar al-Islam. I could go on, but you'd be much better off having Cambridge scholars explain it to you... buy this book!
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