Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Whither the Muslim World?, July 1, 2003
This review is from: The Future of Political Islam (Hardcover)
Graham Fuller has written an illuminating and important book on the relationship between Islam, a religion, and Islamism, a "religous-cultural-political framework for engagement on issues." Most Americans, it would seem, associate Muslims with fanatic bomb-throwers. Fuller points out the diversity of Islam and its adherents and examines some of the reasons why Muslim states and political movements are so often failures in the modern world -- when 1,000 years ago they were in the vanguard of civilization. Amidst many other ideas, Fuller cites, from a UN study, three crisis areas for the Arab world. Lack of political freedom, low level of education, and the low social status of women. He postulates a choice among Islamists. They can continue to ossify or they can find ways to use Islam constructively to confront these crisis areas. This is the challenge of Islam, and the challenge of the U.S. and the West is to help ensure that the choice is the latter and not the former. In his last chapter, Fuller gives two scenarios for the future. One is dark, foreseeing continued conflict between political Islam and the West; the other is more hopeful. The best parts of the book in my view are Fuller's insights into what the U.S. might do to encourage the more liberal Islamists. These include a just solution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and support for positive movements in the Islamic world. It hardly seems in the U.S. national interest to have the Muslim world as an antagonist and thus this book is worth a careful reading for its insights and its policy suggestions.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Overview, and a "Must" for Beginners, September 9, 2003
This review is from: The Future of Political Islam (Hardcover)
"The Future of Political Islam" is a tightly organized and strongly presented overview of the important role of liberal-minded Muslim intellectuals in the ongoing, often contentious interface of the earliest of globalisms --- Islam --- with its contemporary capitalist, technocratic and secular variant. The strengths of this book are its brevity and a certain hard-nosed objectivity. Fuller avoids resting his arguments on the weak but all-too-common generalization of "many Muslims feel that ..." by richly citing "eye-opening" and often provocative statements by leading liberal Islamists such as Laith Kubba and Muhammed Shahrur, among many others. These well illustrate the broad range and reflectiveness of contemporary liberal Islamist thinking. Fuller, after a professional lifetime spent throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, offers some cogent thoughts of his own on how US policymakers can beneficially respond to this vast ferment of "Islamized" social and political agenda-making. In Fuller's view, the struggle -- for this what it is -- between radicals and liberals, conservatives and modernists, to define the role of Islam in modernizing societies has an essential life of its own quite apart from Western policymaking. Nonetheless, the West's ability to understand and empathize with the many nuances of "political Islam" will influence the course of this struggle and the future interplay of these two globalisms.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Refuting the Neocons:, March 21, 2005
Tahir Ali - author of book "Muslim Vote: Counts and Recounts" Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA analyst, who has written many books and monographs on Islam, builds his case with a simple but telling remark. "The issues are not what Islam is, but what Muslims want, and not whether Islam will play a central role in politics, but which Islam." In the concluding chapter of his book, Fuller offers "A Prognosis" about the Muslim world and the US: We need to contemplate, he argues, the possible future(s) that await political Islam and the courses of action available to the United States. While he anticipates further deterioration of the US relations with the Muslim world, he also believes that this dark scenario can be averted if the U.S. is willing to arrest this rapid deterioration by taking a number of concrete steps that include: 1) "A more benign, less confrontational international order and the diminution of terrorism in general, 2) The abandonment by Washington of relentlessly harsh, peremptory, and unilateralist policies toward the Muslim world in the context of War against Terrorism, and adoption of more sympathetic cooperation and engagement with the Muslim world, 3) The attainment of a just solution to the Palestinian problem, 4) Significant reform and political change in the Muslim world, supported actively by the United States, 5) Improved conditions in most of the developing world, and especially in the Muslim world, that ameliorate the current mode impotence and anger and offer hope and sense of progress, 6) High domestic incentives for populations in the Muslim world to reject any sympathies for potential terrorism against the United States as irresponsible, unproductive, and damaging to clearly more promising alternatives before them." A must read for truth seekers.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
