Customer Reviews

No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam

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To be honest, when I first borrowed this book, I expected to sift through an easy read full of quirky anecdotes that I would enjoy but I did not find too engaging. It surprised me, however. Once again, it made me rethink the trends of Egyptian society and Islam. Mrs. Abdo is amazingly persistent in gathering the information for this book. As an expatriate living in Egypt with a first-hand observation of how difficult the society can be for Western women, I was in awe at her achievements.

Her portrait covers the slums to Imbaba to the elite of the American University in Cairo and Egyptian hollywood, and she provides interesting vignettes of each sector of society. I do wish she would have been a bit more comprhensive. The influential and visible Coptic population of Egypt remained on the margins. One cannot expect too much, so perhaps she fealt this was not a part of her analysis. Nonetheless, if you are fascinated by the Mid East and modern Egypt, you will enjoy this book heartily. It is readable and very accessible to the average reader.

"No God But God" offers a wonderful glimpse inside contemporary Egypt as this ancient society struggles with how it will integrate the precepts -- and spirituality -- of Islam into today's secular world. Ever since the Iranian revolution, we have been bombarded by an all-out media effort to demonize Arabs and marginalize their religion, especially the "threat" posed by fundamentalists. Geneive Abdo, an American journalist based in the Middle East, has made an extraordinary effort to track down and interview a vibrant cross-section of believers and has courageously asked them about their vision for Egypt and their agenda for realizing it. Her cast of characters is unforgettable: some frightening in their narrow-mindedness; some amusing in their depiction of the changes around them; and some wise in their capacity to envision a different world view.

I found that her reporting and her insights forced me to reconsider many assumptions about Islam and its followers. After reading the book, it's easier to understand why so many millions of people are clamoring for change and for an opportunity to express their religion the way they choose. During this intense time in the Palestinian/Israeli crisis her respectful and inquisitive treatment of the second-largest Islamic community in the region can help inform the debate ... and calm passions. By finding sources on the front lines of change -- those without access to the media -- she has made her book both intimate and credible. For me, someone without much knowledge about Egypt or Islam, shw was able to paint a very detailed foreground picture while expertly filling in much-needed background information: about the Koran, politics and politicians in Egypt, and the reasons for the "triumph of Islam."

In "No God But God," Texas-born Abdo applies the wiliness of street journalism and the observational wisdom and patience of cultural anthropology to write a tale that reveals so much about the relevance of moderate Islam to modern Egypt, you wonder why no one else wrote tbe book first. Why Abdo sees meaningful change when others see only a seemingly stable U.S. ally unthreatened by religious activism, who knows? But her account is a quick read into changes just around the bend--perhaps as soon as President Mubarak steps down or otherwise leaves the public stage. It is good to know that next Abdo, a correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, intends a book on the shifting scene in Iran. When she's done, folks will be slapping their foreheads again at why she caught the obvious that others could not. Until then, "No God But God" ranks as a must-read for all of us, Arabists and non-Arabists alike.

Abdo's work is very impressive and timely. While Abdo has made clear a clear distinction between Orthodox and militant Islam, she seem to have been completely unreceptive to other genuine forms of Islam such as Sufism or moderate Islam. As such, she has adopted a narrow view of Islam, that of Orthodox Islam or Brotherhood's Islam and saw all others as either secularists or militant.

The Jest of Abdo's findings of the non violent nature of the vast majority of Fundamentalist or Orthodox Moslems was very well presented in her first chapter. Her analysis of the multitude of educated and affluent women willingly taking up the veil was enlightening.

Most fascinating was Abdo's contrast of the situation in Iran to that of Egypt, and how the non-political social Islamic movement in Egypt has produced a more religious society than the Political imposed from above Islam of Iran

Most disappointing is Abdo's failure to represent the alternate pious views of Islam in Egypt, views that accept the religion but see a separation between Government and religion. Such as separation, contrary to Abdo's reading of history is more than the norm of an Egypt that had separate roles for the Sultan, and the Caliph for centuries

As an Egyptian who came to America I was amazed by an American who had such a clear view and analysis of what is going in Egypt, and I hope many American and non-Egyptians would read her book. She tried (with a great success) to let her readers be "Egyptians" in their view to what is happening in their country. Her best conclusion, and which she, intelligently, leaves to the reader to conclude, is that a grassroots solution is always much more effective (and democratic) than an imposed solution (where the solution here is having an Islamic society)

Texas-born journalist Geneive Abdo's application of street journalism and cultural anthropology yields a fresh way to see Egypt, and the Middle East, as less a place of religious fanaticism and more of one of hope and moderation. It is hard to imagine what she went through to research this book and, to her credit, surprising that others have not previously documented what ultimately appears to be the driving influence of moderate Islamic sheikhs and their followers to reform Egypt--before or after President Mubarak takes his leave. Buy this book and you never have to trust the New York Times again.

After laboring through Mary Anne Weaver's thinly reported Portrait of Egypt I was starting to think that the Ikhwan and Gama'at movements were impossible to report on -- a special challenge in a country where the absence of authoritative sources and straightforward government-sourced information makes reporting on ordinary events a challenge.

Yet Geneive Abdo has succeeded brilliantly. Perhaps her Arabic fluency made the decisive difference, although to read the book is to see the many difficulties she faced in getting her subjects to speak. Perhaps she is just very persistent. Her comments about dealing with the Egyptian bureaucracy alone are worth the price of the book. The book is very readable but also highly detailed and carefully footnoted.

Definitely worth a look. I would pass on Weaver's A Portrait of Egypt, however.

In a sense it is a invaluable book, yet this is more because of the poverty of the field of study, than because of her journalistic skills and systemizing capacity. I found these to be rather weak, but in comparison to the 1000s of terrible books on this subject, I might recommend it.

Religion and people all over the world are the same, this book is no different in that it has a hidden undertone for a search for truth. Thats why I rate it 5 star. Any time we have authors like this we are receiveing a great contribution. The book does have a message, in general for help, enlightenment, and a cry for response. These are the undertones of this book not the outward message of Islam in Egypt or any place else. I highly recommend reading SB 1 or God By Karl Mark Maddox.

Sometimes, a single sentence tells you everything you need to know about a book, particularly if it is a really lousy book. That is the case with Geneive Abdo's "No God but God." Here is the sentence:

"However, it must be noted that a Christian ruler by nature is illegitimate under Islam, and the ulama, in theory the religious representation of society, had a sacred duty to overthrow him."

"Him" is Napoleon. Abdo claims to have been educated at Harvard and Princeton. I don't know what kind of crap they teach there, but Napoleon was -- as everybody else knows -- no Christian. He was the most famous freethinker in the world, and the government that sent him to Egypt was not a Christian government but a savagely anti-Christian one.

Abdo is also capable of writing this spectacularly tin-eared sentence:

"The figures leading the (Islamist) revival have matured since their forefathers led a crusade to oust the British . . ."

This might be the stupidest book ever issued by Oxford University Press in its five-plus centuries.

But it is worse than stupid. It is dishonest.

Before getting to that, consider Abdo's thesis: That Egypt is (or was in the 1990s when she was there) undergoing a bottom-up revivification of Islam, which is the greatest threat to the secular regime and also "Egypt's only hope for a brighter future."

The first part is largely true, the second part largely nuts. But in furtherance of her thesis, Abdo splits Egyptian Muslim activists into two camps: the violent militants, associated with Gama'a Islamiyya; and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood.

Her goal, she says, is to allow the partisans to speak to the West in their own words, although she offers no more than sound bites from them.

The key point, though, is that the Brotherhood is "moderate" because it "rejected violence" in the early 1980s, and the violence-prone Gema'a, although it achieved its greatest body counts at the time she was "reporting" -- as a newspaperman, I write that with the greatest distaste -- from Egypt, had shot its bolt.

This is dishonest -- or, possibly, just another example of Abdo's breathtaking stupidity and ignorance -- on three levels:

1. The Muslim Brotherhood has not rejected violence toward Jews. There's this thing now called the Internet -- all the kids are talking about it -- and you can dial up the texts of Friday sermons from around the Muslim world, including Egypt, from the comfort of your easy chair. The week I read Abdo's chapter about the moderation of the Brotherhood, the sermon from the chief clergyman at Azhar, Islam's premier intellectual center, was a call to Muslims to murder Jewish children.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood has not rejected violence toward the secular Egyptian state, it has only called off attacks because they were judged to be too weak to have any effect. The Brotherhood is still dedicated to overthrowing the state and replacing it with a theocracy. No doubt, if blowing up pilgrims and murdering cabinet ministers looks like a good bet, they'll go back to that. In any case, if they get control of the state, we can bet on violence against non-Muslims. Ask the Copts.

3.The Brotherhood is immoral on its own terms, since it was devoted to violence for as long as it believed violence would achieve its politicoreligious goals. That interlude lasted 50 years.

Every page of this book is riddled with obfuscation, but I will mention just one other important point.

Abdo contends that the Islamic revival is not a mere throwback to medieval savagery, because, according to her, the moderate Islamists have decided to accommodate "modernity" within an Islamic conception of social justice.

Now, modernity could be defined in many ways, but although this is a central concept in her book, she does not bother to define it in any way.

One definition would be that, compared with medieval obscurantism, the modern person is open to new streams of information and new ways of interpreting it.

However, resurgent Egyptian Islam is antimodern, in that -- as her informants say over and over -- every choice must be made by reference to the Koran and the hadith.

Nor is there any other indication anywhere in the book to show that Egyptian Muslims are embracing some other description of modernity.

"No God but God" was published in 2000, bad timing, and Oxford has since remaindered it, which would seem an odd business decision at a time when the market for books about political Islam is hot. But there was that little intervening incident in September 2001.

"No God but God" is a worthless piece of political pornography as a book, but it is valuable as a record of a mindset that still exists in some quarters; and, for journalists, a horrible example of the worst of their craft.