Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"Following Muhammad," the way Ernst sees it, is a book that fills a special niche. Although solid scholarship on Islam is available, it is often rendered inaccessible by impenetrable prose and circulated in very narrow academic circles through specialized journals. On the other hand, commercial publications approach the topic from the sensationalist angles and too often betray ideological attack agendas. What Ernst tries to do in "Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World" is to offer the lay reader a balanced, unimpeachably scholarly but thoroughly accessible, fair-minded but critical introduction to the religion of roughly one fifth of the world's population. By extension, the book sheds light on many of the references, and some of the misperceptions, that have become common currency in the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations.
If September 11 influenced the presentation of the book, it is "to highlight how we have constructed the notion of religion in recent history around the ideas of competition and confrontation, since all too often this modern world-imperial concept of religion is allowed to pass unexamined." For too many people, confrontation is the only way they have heard Islam described, he points out, and the culture of mass media today tends to create the notion that the present is the only time worth considering. Ernst therefore devotes the first part of the book to the interplay between religion and history across the ages, and traces the evolution of the long relationship between Islam and the West from the Middle Ages through colonial times to the present. Ernst, who is not Muslim, does not engage in apologetics on behalf of any religion, but rather tries to examine images and their reverse, or negative: each civilization tends to project on the perceived rival its own prejudices and motivations.
Another section of the book examines Islam in terms of the modern concept of religion and gives an overview of the fundamental sources for Muslims: the Quran or scripture, and the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. From this Ernst moves on to the concept of Islamic religious ethics deriving not only from these authoritative texts but also from philosophical inquiry, including the Greek tradition. In his exposition Ernst hopes to provide the reader with independent and appropriate tools to understand the contemporary, and often ill-informed and inflammatory, debate about Islam.
The book's outstanding readability lies in the choice of the interpretative essay as the basic form for each chapter. Despite, or perhaps because, of his stellar academic credentials, the author deliberately eschews the "blind them with science" approach many academics take to impress their ivory tower peers with the impenetrability of their prose. Footnotes and glossaries are kept to a minimum.
Tellingly, one of the goals Ernst sets for this book can seem deceptively modest, by his own admission: to restore full, three-dimensional human complexity to well over a billion people homogenized and caricaturized in the eyes of the West in a manner wholly unacceptable if it were applied to any other religion, race or ethnicity. The fact that this seemingly modest goal is considered so controversial reinforces the timeliness of this book.
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