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A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save His Faith Hardcover – June 5, 2012
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Among the unsettling social shifts in the wake of 9/11 was the global attention paid to Islam. Here in the United States, we became divided, often sadly along partisan lines, between those who believed every Muslim was a potential threat and those who believed no Muslim could do wrong.
For conservative Wisconsin native and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, these radical times meant facing a new reality as a devout Muslim and a patriot—a certain betrayal within his faith, and a need to answer a question that crossed the minds of even the most sensitive and politically correct: “Can a good Muslim be a good American as well?” Jasser founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) to instill in young American Muslims an appreciation for the distinctively positive impact that this nation’s ideals of liberty have had upon the world. As a nationally recognized expert on Muslim radicalization, he offers non-Muslims a definitive comprehension of the difference between Islam and the spiritual cancer known as Islamism, or political Islam, and how violence and extremism run counter to Islam’s true teachings. As he persuasively argues, until we acknowledge the threat of Islamism in all its forms, the majority of Americans will be gulled into recognizing only the most obvious: terrorism.
In A Battle for the Soul of Islam, Jasser embraces both his faith and his country while asking hard questions:
* Are American Muslim children learning entitlement as victims, or are they being taught individual responsibility and critical thinking?
* Are poisonous conspiracy theories dividing their American identity, or are they gaining exposure to reason, nationalism, and patriotism?
* Are Muslims publicly critical of the Islamist movements of the Middle East, or do they remain silent on aspects of religious doctrine that conflict with modernity and universal equality?
* Is the American press downplaying the seditious threat of homegrown Islamist radicalism and the influence of Islamists’ propaganda arm on our governmental policies?
* Is our culture of political correctness a major obstacle toward long-overdue Muslim reform against Islamism?
All these years after 9/11, it’s time for us to understand the true threat of Islamism. It is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution, and A Battle for the Soul of Islam builds a solid, balanced, and imperative must-read foundation for the fight.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherThreshold Editions
- Publication dateJune 5, 2012
- Dimensions6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-101451657943
- ISBN-13978-1451657944
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Dr. Jasser is one of the most courageous and relentless pursuers of truth and freedom in the Muslim world. Battle for the Soul of Islam takes you beyond the sound bites to show you what it really means to be a moderate Muslim fighting against those who have perverted your religion.” --Glenn Beck, New York Times bestselling author of Being George Washington
"A candid, patriotic pushback against Muslim stereotyping...a strident call to energize Muslim Americans to promote notions of pluralism, toleration and equal rights for women." --Kirkus
"Dr. Jasser is an American hero in the war radical Islam has declared on us. Whether we prevail in this long war may very well depend on how closely we listen to him." --William J. Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Man and former US Secretary of Education
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- Publisher : Threshold Editions; First Edition (June 5, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1451657943
- ISBN-13 : 978-1451657944
- Item Weight : 1.04 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,371,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,454 in Islam (Books)
- #15,464 in Political Ideologies & Doctrines (Books)
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There are, however, dire faults in Dr. Jasser’s analysis of the issues involved and therefore in his prescriptive remedies. His signature shortcoming derives precisely from his having been raised in Wisconsin by parents who fled the totalitarian Assad regime in Syria to enjoy the personal liberty and economic freedoms available in America. It is because the author practices Islam solely as a religion, one of many which flourish in America, that he misses the point. “My Islam,” he frequently notes, isn’t supremacist, nor intolerant, nor violent. He approaches religion as a spiritual journey and, applying a very American approach, feels free to reject the features of his religion which are illogical, anachronistic, irrelevant, unconstitutional, or absurd.
The suite of features which Dr. Jasser firmly rejects fall under the category of politics and law. For American readers this is axiomatic. Our religions do not intrinsically involve politics. When religion does intrude, as in the abortion debate, most Americans firmly resist the influence of religious authorities. By contrast, Islam, as Dr. Jasser well knows, sets out a legal code of conduct, “shari’a,” which seeks to control family relations, inheritance, commerce, finance, property law, civil law, criminal law, civil administration, taxation, constitutional matters, international relations, war, ethics, and every other aspect of human existence. None of these are spiritual matters. It is all well and good that “my Islam” doesn’t comprise this extensive legal framework since that is where the violence, intimidation, intolerance, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and hate speech reside. But in excising these unsavory features Dr. Jasser’s personal brand of Islam would be unrecognizable to the “ummah,” the rest of the world’s Muslims.
The Arabic word for Dr. Jasser’s approach is “ijtihad.” It means any use of independent reasoning to interpret what to believe or accept in the Islamic holy scriptures, comprising the “Qur’an,” the “Hadith,” and the “Umdat." “Ijtihad” is considered blasphemy and is a capital offense in mainstream Islam, as it is practiced everywhere except perhaps Dr. Jasser’s household. In fact just the mere suggestion that he practices his own version, “my Islam,” would be enough to get him beheaded in the twelve countries which use “shari’a” as the sole basis for jurisprudence.
So why should the reader care if Dr. Jasser’s version of Islam is discordant with the other billion or so who practice it? Shouldn’t we encourage him in his efforts to reform Islam with this book and by his example? What’s not to like about a moderate like him? Let’s take a closer look. Dr. Jasser says that violence, “jihad” in particular, is a distortion of the true Islam by extremists. He says that violence has nothing to do with Islam. That is simply not true. “Jihad”, or spreading the faith through violence, is required of all Muslims. Three quarters of the organizations on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations are Islamic, and of the most recently added ten, all are Islamic. There is absolutely a correlation between violence and Islam, just as the Prophet Muhammad intended back in the seventh century.
Take another false assertion, that “the Qur’an teaches respect for other’s religious beliefs.” That is unadulterated hogwash. In scores of verses the Qur’an incites Muslims to attack and kill infidels until none remain in the world. In one illuminating passage the Qur’an says, “The Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, with Muslim fighting them until the Jew hides behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees saying, ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, this Jew behind me, come kill him.’”
In the end Dr. Jasser perpetuates a myth which Americans have found fatally seductive, that the “violent extremists” constitute a fringe element which perverts true Islam, which is actually as peaceful as any other religion. The fact is, and again Dr. Jasser knows it, that the violent extremists constitute not the fringe but the core of Islam. They populate its heart and soul. It is reform Muslims like him who constitute a fringe element. The “ummah,” or Islamic faithful of the world, would say that it is Dr. Jasser who is perverting the true Islam. Anyone who holds the Qur’an in one hand and the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in the other will be compelled to agree.
When the Pew Research Institute interviewed Muslims who had immigrated to countries in Western Europe, between a quarter and a third (statistics varied by country) responded that terrorism, defined as violence against civilians, was acceptable. And that Pew study was before the E.U. recently opened its borders to millions of Muslim refugees so those statistics clearly understate contemporary European Muslims’ endorsement of violence against non-Muslims. Pew was unable to conduct its survey in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the seats of Sunni and Shiite Islam respectively because of the threat of violence against their interviewers.
The peaceful, tolerant, exclusively spiritual soul of Islam envisioned by Dr. Jasser and for which his book proposes to battle is, regrettably, wishful thinking. It is this reviewer’s belief that only the emergence of a Muslim Martin Luther willing to challenge Islam’s core orthodoxies can truly alter the reality of a violent, supremacist, political movement masquerading as a religion. That person clearly isn’t going to be Dr. Jasser.
Reading Jasser's book is a refreshing and clear reminder that radical Islam, or Islamism, does not represent all Muslims. Jasser makes this point very persuasively. But I also get the impression that Jasser's parental and educational background and intelligence puts him in a unique and small class of Muslims, and more importantly, atypical. The onslaught of daily news about Muslim atrocities in the name of their religion begs the reader to question whether there is any relevance to the apparently small group of "reform" Muslims who think like Jasser. (Note that I did not say "moderate" Muslims. Try to define moderate you will end up defining the problem.)
Reform Muslims are stunningly silent about the behavior of the (minority? majority?) of Islamists. Reform Muslims might (and have) reasonably said, "Why should we have to apologize for their bad behavior?" My answer: They don't have to apologize. More precisely, no one wants them to apologize. What we want is for reform Muslims to outright reject and condemn the bad behavior in a public and unambiguous way. They might further say, "we are law abiding citizens, why do we have to concern ourselves with what others do?" Again, the answer is that they don't have to. But if they don't, they should not be surprised when the vast majority of non-Muslims believe that their refusal to condemn is tacit approval, or at least sympathy with behavior and values that is more than a little threatening to the western way of life. My sense from the book is that Jasser is working in the right direction. But since I have never heard of the organizations he works with until I read this book, it suggests that too little is being done.
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