Islam: An Introduction [Paperback]

Annemarie Schimmel (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 182 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (May 14, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791413284
• ISBN-13: 978-0791413289
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #86,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So simple and brief, yet so complete, July 5, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Islam: An Introduction (Paperback)

I am a Muslim and consider myself reasonably educated about Islam, but I hadnt realized the true diversity in Islam until I read this book. Truly magnificent snapshot of Islam, its Founder the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), its beliefs and practices and the history of Islam, its various movements, its flavors....

The book is very easy reading, and in my oppinion, to a westerner, this book is perhaps as good an introduction to Islam as can be.

Professor Schimmel is most well versed and experienced in the topic that she address in this book. Her credentials regarding the subject are very high indeed.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Introduction to Islam, July 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Islam: An Introduction (Paperback)

This is a simple, highly readable and quick introduction on Islam: a multi-dimensional and dynamic religion that is growing very rapidly in all parts of the world. Professor Schimmel has done an excellent job of introducing this great religion as it has been practiced since centuries. I highly recommend this book to journalists and people who are related to media to get a clearer and true understanding of this religion. This book does its part of justice to clarify some of the misconceptions about Islam in media. I also recommend this book to readers who already have an understanding of this religion; Professor Schimmel besides introducing Islam (both its form and essence) also provide her views from the understanding of vast body of Islamic literature, history and culture. I would like to specially point to the last section of this book in which Professor Schimmel discusses the future of Islam in today's currents of modernism. She has provided some of her most summed up thoughts about this topic, which I am sure, will make sense to most of young Muslim readers like me. I also highly recommend her book on the topic of the "Mystical Dimensions of Islam."

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Neither here nor there, May 1, 2005

By 

3rdeadly3rd (Brisbane, Queensland Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Islam: An Introduction (Paperback)

Annemarie Schimmel's "Islam: An Introduction" is definitely not the best introductory work on Islam out there. There is a sense of dilettantism in this work that is particularly disconcerting.

Not to say that Schimmel is not a scholar of high talent, she just does not show it here. As a prime example, there are no footnotes anywhere in her work, which makes tracing some of her quotations a little harder, to say nothing of seeing where her arguments are drawn from.

This book does everything which an introductory book on Islam should do - cover the history of the faith to some degree and introduce the central tenets - but it does so in a way not designed to really sink these facts in for the reader. The language used, a rather self-consciously archaic series of constructions ("It is this rejection of, nay, cursing of..." being a prime example of her normal turn of phrase) is partly responsible for this.

At the same time, there is a general impression of the faith being compartmentalised. The reader could well be excused for thinking that Islam is no longer a major force in world politics, where of course current events prove that hypothesis well and truly incorrect. (...) Schimmel's prose distances the reader from the subject.

A book of this length could sometimes be seen as having that as an advantage over longer works on the same subject - as it won't deal with minute details of the subject. Unfortunately, Schimmel's reluctance to deal with complexity must be contrasted with her insistence on the full array of diacritics on any Arabic word. I am firmly of the belief that the more diacritics the casual reader - to say nothing of the undergraduate student using this as a resource - is presented with, the less engaged with the subject he or she is.

I really cannot recommend Schimmel's work for anyone for whom such luminaries as Esposito are available. In lieu of them (and they are easily orderable from this website), then Schimmel might be a very poor alternative.