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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Certainly topical, if flawed it'll inspire you to learn more, December 5, 2002
This review is from: The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Hardcover)
Having finished this book just as headlines about Saudi charities and U.S. recipients emerged, Schwartz's overview appears timely. His Jewish background and interfaith efforts in the Balkans enrich his study. Too often, Christian readers receive in such journalistic introductions comparisons between their faith and Islam, while Jewish readers are often ignored--it's assumed Israeli issues suffice! Many reviews here have pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of his book already. I might add that the attempt to pit Wahhabism against Sufi/Sh'ia interpretations does make for a rather unwieldy combination. So much of the book involves Saudi machinations, and so little by balance opens up alternative versions of Islam. Certainly his sympathies are defended, but the book cannot seem to settle for either a sustained exploration of the narrow Saudi ideology or a convincing insider's defense of the expansive Sufi/Sh'ia messages. Too often, Schwartz seems to rely upon his earlier journalism (and it's not often the Albanian Catholic Bulletin, the Anderson Valley Advertiser [as in that great Boonville brewery!], and the Forward share bibliographical mention). His accounts of the Balkans fragment, and the reader hops with him from noted figure to infamous tragedy without really feeling the depth of the human impact of either war or enlightenment. Likewise, with his Saudi chapters, the destruction committed by the regime against its Sh'ia and other dissident Muslims lacks the telling detail needed for a new reader to this topic to enter fully into what obviously for the author is a heartfelt as well as intellectual issue of the utmost importance. His connecting the Saudi to U.S. academia and think-tanks and mosques is intermittently revealing, but he does not delve in-depth as I expected, say, on Saudi funding of American mosques and centers. Lacking footnotes: he lists many works in the text but without hardly any citations. One must guess from the authors he cites what texts he has quoted from and as for the page references of 98% of what he mentions, forget it. I do applaud his inclusion of URL's and acknowledge his reliance on Net sources, but since the vast majority of his research listed is from traditional print, his lack of scholarly adherence to convention leaves readers eager to find more having to make more of an effort than is customary to do so. He could have put endnotes in for more than a few of his sources--only a handful appear at the back of the book. For instance, he notes Khalid Duran's "Children of Abraham: An Intro to Islam for Jews" book and some Sufi sources that I found intriguing. But, again, no exact page or even title citations discourage the reader faced in his works consulted with pages of titles and very little guidance. And, as others have noted on amazon.com, why he plays his evident embrace of Sufism up and down simultaneously dampens his credibility. Surely his example would strengthen and not weaken his claim to have both observed the faith he had studied first without and then within to defend what he sees as its proper form. He isn't a dispassionate academic but an involved pilgrim, and I would have liked to have had Schwartz more throroughly blend the two rather than piece together much of what seem to have been his articles over the past decade. What could have been included more often? One example: in a few pages on Marin County and John Walker Lindh, he mixed his Bay Area perspective with a take on Lindh that could have become its own book! I look forward to more from Schwartz, and thanks to his own blending of Western analyst, Balkan-languages speaker, and Sufi practitioner, he brings a rare perspective to the topic.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Two cheers at best, December 3, 2002
This review is from: The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Hardcover)
One of the oddest things about this book is its reviews, positive and negative alike. Apparently none of the reviewers have noticed that Schwartz, to the extent one can judge from a plethora of hints in the text (most obviously in the Acknowledgements) is, most likely, himself a Sufi. It is pointless, therefore, to guess whether he is on the Right or on the Left and whether his book is anti-Islamic - it definitely is not. It is, in fact, a polemical tract, and whereas I do not believe the picture of the contemporary Islam he paints is without merit, it is seriously flawed due to his relentless Sufi perspective. Thus, ayatollah Homeini gets away with a mild rebuke simply because he was a Shiite and pro-Sufi. The author somehow fails to mention that the practice of suicidal martyrdom was not invented by the Wahhabites. It goes a long way back with the Shiites and was widely practiced during the Iran-Iraq war. Iranian revolution, even though not exportable per se because tainted with Shiism, was an idea and an example that went a long way. Furthermore, Schwartz gives very different treatment to rather similar secular regimes. He professes great dislike for Kemal Ataturk but deals gently with Nasser of Egypt, pretty ugly character. Everything clears up once we recall that Ataturk banned Sufi orders, whereas Nasser who was fighting Wahhabi-like Moslem Brotherhood, left the Sufis alone. And so forth. The history of Wahhabism and its present day worldwide influence deserve to be widely known, and Schwartz is apparently well served by his Sufi sources. Still, terms like "diabolical" do not belong in a book that purports to retain some objectivity. To conclude, the title itself is wrong. It suggests that the diabolical face of Wahhabism is somehow balanced by the angelic face of Sufism. No, it is not - and not only because Sufism, thanks to its horizontal structure, is far from uniform and does not possess a hierarchy to speak for itself. Every major religion can possess only one merit in the eyes of those who are not its adherents: it could leave them alone. In other words, it could be either intrusive or ignorable. Islam, whatever its historical deserts, today does not pass this test.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Necessary Story of Wahhabism, November 24, 2002
This review is from: The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Hardcover)
The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror by Stephen Schwartz (Doubleday) The social and political consequences of Wahhabism are shown to have created a climate of intolerance and oppression that has warped the fabric of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Now with an excess of petrol dollars, this Wahhabism gives succor and support to ideologies of hatred and terror throughout the Islamic world. This story needs to be understood as some form of Wahhabism is often at the root of extremist Islam. Another feature of The Two Faces of Islam is that moderate Muslims have strong populist traditions that are assaulted by Wahhabi triumphalist deep pockets. A good read about one important thread in the extremist politics of Islam. Recommended. The hostility of most of the other reader reviews shows, in my opinion, how polemic breeds extremer polemic. This work is definitely polemical. The central message about the pernicious effects of Wahhabism on Saudi society and politics, as well as its warping effect on liberal democratic tendencies in Islam remain the pillars of good sense upon which this work is constructed. Judge for yourself and do not let the name-callers blind you from learning important consequences of Wahhabi extremism for international terrorism.
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