ISLAM UNVEILED

September 1, 2002
To proclamations that Islam is a religion of peace, Spencer responds (in chapters entitled with questions such as "Is Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?" and "Is Islam Tolerant of Non-Muslims?") with evidence, historical and recent, of harsh treatment of women, other religionists, and social minorities in Islamic societies. Besides the facts Spencer presents, his citations of the Qur'an; the " hadiths," or sayings and deeds of Muhammad; and Islamic authorities across the liberal-to-fundamentalist spectrum verify attitudes and practices that secular Westerners and present-day Jews and Christians don't think of as peaceable, just, or decent. For instance, slavery and polygamy may be waning in Islamic societies, but they aren't disapproved of or banned because the Qur'an and " hadiths" endorse them. Islam hasn't adapted to change nearly as much as Judaism and Christianity have, and that accounts for its savage relations with the West. Spencer doesn't see either Islam moderating or the West regarding Islam realistically any time soon. Barring "some wondrous intervention from the Merciful One," he concludes, the immediate future "will be difficult." Alarmingly cogent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2002
Egypt is at the center of Bell's superbly readable account of violence in the name of Islam because the civilization fostered by the Nile has been the Arab cultural heartland since militant Islam's seventh-century conquest of it. How galling, then, that modern Egypt has been ruled by a succession of outsiders neither Arabic nor, often, even Islamic. Moreover, when real Egyptians finally gained control in the 1950s, they established a secular, Westernizing military regime. Against the successive Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak governments arose a movement insisting on harshly enforced Islamic law. Its prime theorist, Sayyid Qutb, and propagandist, Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), are Egyptian, and the movement, embodied by evanescent terrorist groups throughout the world, has been a font of assassination and terror from its outset. Bell's relevantly detailed book should be one of the first to read for understanding of so-called Islamic terrorism, not least because Bell never blames the religion, Islam, for the excesses of Qutb and Rahman's movement, which he always calls Islamism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)