Customer Reviews

Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror (Nation Books)

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This is a really terrific book, confronting some of the most urgent questions in our world today. Is secular feminism a purely Western phenomenon? is religious fundamentalism always at odds with women's equality? should American power be used to free women in other countries, as Bush claimed he was freeing Afghani women from the Taliban? With fundamentalist Islam -- and repression of women -- on the rise in post-war Iraq, and fundamentalist Christians opposed to women's freedom of choice running the USA, the questions this book raises are tragically timely. The authors bring fascinatingly diverse perspectives to the table. Some are strongly committed to the secular, others committed to more humane, egalitarian interpretations of their faith. This book contains writing by some of the sharpest living female intellectuals, and represents a wide range of experiences, political and religious views and nationalities. Betsy Reed has done a wonderful job of culling and shaping this work into a beautifully conversational whole. Katha Pollitt's introduction is, like all her writing, brilliant: elegantly irreverent and clear-headed. Provocative and absorbing -- everyone should find something to disagree with! Buy it now!!!!

This collection of essays by scholars and journalists East and West gives a fascinating and detailed picture of the threat every kind of religious fundamentalism poses to women's human rights. But it does more -- it offers fresh ways of understanding the appeal of fundamentalism to men and women both. We think of fundamentalism as ancient -- actually it is a modern response to rapid and uneven social change, including modern roles for women. Karen Amstrong makes this argument in "The Battle for God," but she is mostly interested in theology. I learned more from "Nothing Sacred," because it explicitly describes the worlds from which fundamentalism emerges, the hopes it exploits and the damage it does-- not just in the Muslim world, but in "Christian" America, in Israel, and in India. Wherever religious movements seek to restore a lost and imaginary pristine past, women are the big losers.

The essays seemed expertly chosen to represent a widely divergent set of opinions. With an intro by the extraordinary Pollitt, how could you not get pulled in?

The essays in "Nothing Sacred" are a great antidote to the simplistic mainstream thinking about the "war on terror" [sic]. From Katha Pollitt's fantastic introduction through all of the various essays, I learned a lot about the feminist perspective on religious fundamentalism.