book review and sadness

[winterbadger]

21/50: Islam by Karen Armstrong. I listened to this on CD; it was much shorter (at 6 discs) than the the Rashid book I listened to before (I think that was 16 CDs!), but it was quite good. I think that Armstrong oversimplifies when she starts looking at the broad sweep of history, and that makes me want to argue with some of the points she makes. But I suspect that when I die, they will find engraved on my heart , not a simple "Calais", but the more prolix "But it's more complicated than that!" While she may be a little too general in some of her remarks, the meat of the book is an excellent, 'detailed but not too detailed for the lay reader' (I think) history of the rise of Islam as a religion and its development as both a spiritual and a material force. Armstrong does well at pointing out the ways in which many of the negative characteristics that modern Westerners tend to associate with Islam are either totally unIslamic or are later accretions that are quite at odds with the message of the Prophet (though I think she tries to hard to depict Islam as essentially peaceful). She also explains very capably why the distinction between "religious" and "secular" that many in the modern West are so attached to is not appealing to most Muslims. She highlights the connection in Islam between religion and politics and religion and history. She explains quite well the development of the Sunni/Shi'a split and of the mystical Sufi orders. She shows the different currents in Islamic thought caused by encounters with Classical Western thinkers and with early and later Western cultures (pointing out, inter alia, that the veiling and seclusion of women was a practice picked up by the Arabs from the Byzantine Greeks, not a native one). And she provides the reader with an excellent appreciation of how and why Islamic experiments with Western modernism have failed and have led to disappointment, frustration, and a bitter rejection of modernism by many Muslims. Finally, she examines the rise of fundamentalism (in Islam and other faiths) and ponders the challenges that it presents to creating a happy equilibrium between the Muslim world and the rest of us.

In progress:
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Sultan's Seal by Jenny White
The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688-1691 by John Childs
Hostile Skies: A Combat History of the American Air Service in World War I by James J. Hudson
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Understanding China by John Bryan Starr
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas Desjardins
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Theoretical Criminology by George B. Vold et al.

Today's news, all over, is just making me very sad. Our country's politics are so broken right now, and I see so many of the choices that we've made lately making them more so, not less, for the foreseeable future.

And poor Norway! OMG. I know nothing other than what I'm reading on the Post and hearing on NPR, but it sounds like it's either Norway's own Oklahoma City bombing or some sort of Islamic extremist attack, and all the scenarios I can envisage around either are in flavours of bad and worse. I feel so sorry for the families of those who have been hurt and killed, and so sorry for all those who are totally guiltless but who will bear the brunt of the resulting rage. Which, of course, just plays into the hands of the terrorists, whoever they are.