Customer Reviews

Shattering the Myth

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I first heard of this book during a public radio program on which the author, Bruce Lawrence, was one featured guest. I read the professional reviews and figured it would be a good book. I did wonder why no lay reader had reviewed it. Having now finished the book on Nov. 14, 2001, I wonder if I'm the only person outside the academic world who has ever managed to get through it.

I began by reading the introduction; that was almost a fatal mistake. The writing style was difficult to follow, and the language was arcane, sprinkled with words like "postmodern," "metanarrative" and "perspectivist." After bogging down in the introduction for several days, I moved on to the first chapter. Fortunately, the book became somewhat easier to follow at that point, but the author continued to use uncommon words where common ones would suffice and to use common words in uncommon ways. He also had a tendency to begin sentences with "If." The clause that followed the "If" typically referred to an argument that was not spelled out, but which the reader needed to infer from the context. The author also made frequent use of qualifying phrases that contributed to the difficulty of the reading without adding much to the meaning.

In the book, Bruce Lawrence surveyed the Muslim world, focusing on the role of fundamentalism in various Muslim countries, then turning to the role of women in parts of that world. He ended with a consideration of Jihad and corporate culture in Malaysia. His sections on fundamentalism and Muslim women were the clearest sections. In the last section, he tended to lapse into a more arcane use of language again.

I cannot criticize the content of the book, because I have been quite ignorant of the Muslim world until very recently, but I have the sense that the author had a comprehensive and subtle understanding of the material he covered. Though it certainly wasn't easy, I believe I learned a good deal from this book. In the current world context, I think many educated readers would appreciate and benefit from the author's knowledge. Alas, I doubt that most people will do so unless he can write something that is clearer and more accessible.

... This work explodes the myth in reverse, of the alien,hostile, and monolithic Islam, and is both a corrective to a corrective and useful as a reminder of the dangers of one-dimensional reduction of any socio-historical complexity, most especially Islam where the journalist impressionism of accounts of terrorism lose sight of the endless rooms in a large labyrinth. There many things, like the legacy of Sufism, are not even visible to the naked eye. We seem left to repeat, 'Islam is this, or this'. The scale alone of Islam is tremendous, and the Middle East is but one star in this constellation, one should retell the tale of the blindmen and the elephant. There is an irony to world history that the world of Islam suffers the abstract cunning and mathematically economic jihad of westernization turned globalization, and as bedouins all we might note the curious genaeology of inheritance in both systems.
This book was reviewed alongside Paul Fregosi's Jihad.