Islam: A Short History


Abstract:
A well written historical overview.

Body:
After seeing it in the store and getting the recommendation of a friend, I bought Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong. She has written several other histories related to religion, and my friend had read one of them and told me it was very good. Having read Islam, I agree: Armstrong writes clear, concise passages that paint a picture of past events and people. The only thing some readers might find hard about her style is that she assumes a History Channel level of familiarity with Islam. Characters like Saladin and places like Moorish Spain are mentioned only in passing, in part because she doesn't consider them very important to the big story, but also because her aim is to cover 1500 years in 150 pages, leaving little room for side stories that readers can learn about on their own. Hopefully, however, uninitiated readers will take these moments to explore and learn more about these fascinating "asides", because once you see the whole picture connected with the details, you may gain new insight into Islam and its past, present, and future roll for humanity. Thus, overall, I give the book a strong recommendation for anyone interested in religion, history, or politics.

Now for my own "aside" in this review. Near the end of the book, Armstrong talks about the fundamentalist movement in Islam and describes it as a reaction to modernization. She wrote another book about fundamentalist movements in religions, so she only summarizes the situation here. Fundamentalist Islam appears near the turn of the 20th century and strengths after the repartitioning of the Islamic world after World War I and World War II, reaching its modern form in the 1970s. Further, she observes that the stronger the modernizing movement, the stronger the reacting fundamentalist movement. She explains that since modernization correlated with secularization in the West, when modernization has reached Islamic lands, secularization has been brought along, but, she argues, this is the wrong approach for Islam. Although Christianity fits well with the idea of a secular public life and a private sacred life, Islam sees such a movement heresy. Not to say that, historically, Islam was intolerant of other religions; in fact, prior to the modernization of the West, the Islamic world was probably the most religiously tolerant of all. But Islam is tied with practice and politics, so Islamic modernization cannot happen through forced secularization. Rather, secularization must be allowed to happen on its own as Islamic nations modernize and people choose the amount of secularization they want, just as Western peoples did. By removing the pressure to be like the West, many of the social and political problems of Islam may evaporate as the Islamic people are allowed to modernize themselves (so long as the extant problems in Islam don't annihilate the world within Islam or without in the mean time). That is her argument, and I'm inclined to agree.

Posted: Fri - December 29, 2006 at 08:51 PM         |    

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