Customer Reviews

The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the best book on Islam or terrorism in the last ten years. The extraordinary circumstances under which it was written, as a collaboration between Sen. Bond and Simons, sets it apart from an ocean of one-sided post-9/11 tomes. As a narrative, The Next Front is as exhilarating as Looming Tower or Three Cups of Tea, weaving together 30 characters across 6 countries--and yet it is intellectually satisfying in a way that far exceeds those books. The authors state their ambition in the introduction: "Americans need to penetrate the thinking of the region." Despite this enormous scope, The Next Front is a quick and easy read, unweighed by historical digressions or tedious statistics. In light of their political differences, Bond and Simons skip policy altogether and drill right to the people themselves and their stories. It is not, I should add, yet another overblown neo-orientalist travelogue, presuming to explain everything from Mohammed to global warming via a handful of windswept anecdotes on the way to the Dubai airport. The Next Front is an authoritative masterwork, grounded in decades of lived experience. I couldn't begin to summarize the "takeaways." The cover flap says it's about smart power vs Bush-era hard power, but of course all policies are "smart" by their own account. Unlike 99% of current affairs books, this simply must be read, cover to cover. It is "minimally redundant." The authors do offer some general policy proposals, scattered here and there, but there's no 14-point plan, few explicit answers nor implicit stereotypes, nor do they fall back on open-ended anecdotes. Rather, the authors bypass all prior pitfalls and convey the reality of Islam by way of an ingenious device--personas, personal stories representing complex demographics via authoritative storytellers (c.f. Edward Said's "exilic" perspective). This is of course magnified by the remarkable circumstances of Bond and Simons' collaboration, each masters of storytelling in their own far-flung spheres (Simons is the epitome of Said's "general secular intellectual"). Islamic scholarship has never produced such an enlightening work of art. In the wake of Orientalism, academics continue to crank out tomes that claim to reveal the essence of Islam by "unveiling" contemporary literature, and unveiling their unveiling, ad infinitum--yielding unreadable and useless Leviathans that crush people to sleep each night. Bond and Simons skip over the Islamic scholars and ethnographers into a realm of communications science. I have no idea if their technique was informed by communications science (i.e. personas in usability and marketing research), but The Next Front is the best example I have yet seen of the future of authorship in the post-print era. Not that the authors lack bias (in one case, extreme biases, in my very biased opinion), nor do they disguise it with squirrely historical or academic digressions. Criticism is irrelevant. There is real blood flowing through every page of this book, laser-like intelligence into the most complex problem in the most complex part of the world--literally, Vietnam times Iraq. Every page is bursting with the promise of globalization as well as impending horror. The Next Front is a literary IED--shocking, gripping, radically altering one's conception of Islamic and Asian culture, empowering the reader to effect geopolitical change immediately, whether as a senator or, as the authors put it, a global citizen "in sneakers and sandals." What is the longterm significance of Barack Hussein Obama? The Cairo speech? The Peace Prize? The Next Front solves these well-flogged riddles and countless others, intertwined with the "mother riddle" of Asian Islam. Personally I doubt that The Next Front will top any mainstream bestseller lists as it doesn't reinforce any political or scholarly biases, but as far as revealing the future of Islam and the War on Terror, it is a lamp of knowledge. An overwhelming, transformative experience for anyone with the slightest curiosity about foreign affairs.

The Next Front is being published at an opportune time because our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Barak Obama needs Americans to better understand the Muslim ummah. Bond and Simons tell us how to achieve this vital goal: by putting Americans in "sandals and sneakers" on the ground in Southeast Asia. This important book should be on the "must-read" list of every American, including President Obama.

In The Next Front, Simons puts his Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist's skills to work and draws the reader into a complex subject: Islam in Southeast Asia. Countries, towns and villages come alive through details and interpretations. But it is the introduction to "real people" that makes the issues frighteningly clear, that America is "asleep at the switch" and needs to begin building relationships with Muslims in the "jungles, rice fields and emerging economic centers of Southeast Asia." This should be a wake-up call to policy makers and ordinary citizens. I wanted to say "I loved this book," but that might demean its gravitas.

The Next Front is an important book for anybody hoping to understand how America can constructively engage with the Islamic world. The book makes a strong argument in favor of placing Southeast Asia at the center of America's efforts to defuse the rising tide of religious extremism and it does so in a highly readable manner.

A compelling and readable book on a topic most Americans worry about -- radical Islam -- in a part of the world most Americans ignore -- Southeast Asia. The good news, Simons and Bond argue, is that the United States has an opportunity to improve relationships with moderate Islamic governments and thus counter burgeoning radical influence in an area heavily populated by Muslims. This, they argue, is indeed the next crisis for America, an opportunity we cannot afford to botch. Their story is told through engaging interviews with regional leaders who hope America will learn from mistakes made among Muslims farther west.

If more people in the world thought before acting and used the type of thinking that it took to create this work, then the world would be a better place and, quite simply, there would be less violence and more peace. It's that simple. A must read if you are committed to peace and to solving problems without violence whenever possible.

Lew Simons is the real deal -- a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has witnessed and written about the world's most significant news events. His writing goes far beyond conventional wisdom. He is exactly the kind of journalist we need to hear from about such complex issues.

Washington will be well advised to pay special attention to what Simons and Bond say in this book if it wishes to understand the vast majority of the Muslim ummah, and avoid the mistakes of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The authors' deep understanding of the region forms the backdrop for their assertion that the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism can be stemmed only by engaging Muslim Southeast Asia. This view is also shared by non-Muslim Southeast Asia.
This book is a must-read for policy makers, political analysts, journalists and everybody else interested in pursuing the road to global peace.

A thoughtful, admirably well-researched work of journalism. The book reads like a gripping set of first-person reports from Southeast Asia and, at the same time, a cogent argument of how we Americans should reevaluate the region. While I don't agree completely with the book's thesis (I'm skeptical of the suggestion that Southeast Asia's Islamic traditions are historically more peace-loving than other areas of the Muslim world), I have to give ample to credit to the the two authors' detailed research and the cogent way that they argue. The USA is just beginning to mull over the words "Islam" and "Muslim," and is a long way from appreciating the many definitions those words have to the billion-plus people who practice Islam. This book points us in a very helpful direction: Islam may be Arabia-centric but, in its modern forms, it is not an inherently Arab phenomenon. Southeast Asia is a highly important--and largely overlooked--center of Islamic thought and religious practice, all going on in a set of cultures we Americans often fail to link at all with Islam. I hope the book signals, too, that we're starting to become more acutely aware of Asia's role in Islam, and vice versa.

This is an excellent read, and most importantly it needs to be read by all if we (U.S. citizens) are going to understand the world of Islam and how to live in peace with Southeast Asia. It is also very important to know that the authors have great expertise and integrity and I only hope that the Obama administration reads this book and follows its direction.