Ali-Karamali may overstate the case somewhat, but her book is significant in a time of continued misconceptions about Islam.
An examination of Shariah, a concept that has been distorted in the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years.
Ali-Karamali, author of The Muslim Next Door, attempts to explain the meaning of Shariah to non-Muslims, emphasizing it as a benign and indeed beneficial trait of Islam. After a section introducing readers to basic fundamentals of Islam—e.g., Who was Muhammad? What is the Quran?—the author begins to unwrap the meaning of Shariah itself. Refreshingly, she shies away from giving a simple definition, instead characterizing Shariah as a broad and in some ways all-encompassing system of Islamic wisdom. In fact, in the introduction, she writes, “in religious terms, shariah is the path you take to quench your spiritual thirst….It’s the path you follow to be a good and righteous person. In a nutshell: shariah is the way of God.” Throughout the book, Ali-Karamali notes that Shariah, in its truest form, was and is entirely flexible and adaptable to varying cultures and conditions. It was built on generations of scholarly analysis and interpretation of the Quran and the Hadith (the words and acts of Muhammad). The author argues that for generations, Shariah promoted a healthy, fruitful civilization marked by concern for those in need, clemency, and the rights of women, among much else. She contends that Western colonization interrupted Muslim cultures, disrupting and perverting Shariah, forcing it to conform to more rigid standards found in European law. As she explains, Muslim-majority countries continue to grapple with how to rediscover the flexible, liberalizing Shariah practices of the past. Ali-Karamali’s explanation of Shariah is a useful counter to the perceptions of many in the West. Throughout, she contends that the misuse of Shariah is limited to a miniscule fraction of Muslims and that without European interference, everything from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s abuses of power to the rise of the Islamic State group could have been avoided.
Ali-Karamali may overstate the case somewhat, but her book is significant in a time of continued misconceptions about Islam.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3800-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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