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Conrad reviews Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, at our Read Islam book review journal here at Talk Islam.
If you’d like to review a book for Read Islam, drop me a line or leave a comment – we aren’t exactly the LRB, yet. But inshallah… 
superb review at altmuslim of “Can Islam Be French?
Since there’s been a recent conversation on Afghanistan and the myth of homosexuality, I thought I make a separate post from the comment I left earlier.
Here’s the documentary (quality work no less) called Jihad for Love [youtube playlist]
One can appreciate above if you read an essay by Scott Kugle in Progressive Muslims. He has also written a book (which I have not read). [Amazon link]. Here’s one quick review of the essay [futureislam.com]:
One of the volume’s boldest and most compelling essays is Scott Kugle’s, “Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims.” Through careful textual exegesis, Kugle provides a detailed rejoinder to the narrow and exclusivist constructions of homosexuality among premodern Muslim jurists.
Just some of the resources to make an informed worldview.
Review of Mark Siljander’s “A Deadly Misunderstanding”
I want to be clear: this is no milquetoast universalist pablum. Siljander is NOT claiming some notion of all roads leading to God. What he’s doing is far more careful and well-thought than that. He is demonstrating the frequency with which fundamental–often violent–differences between the Abrahamic faiths are based on ignorance: not only ignorance of the “other’s” faith, but all too often ignorance of the actual text and context of our own faith and its creeds.
I read good number of books and Mark still holds a high place for me in terms of promoting interfaith dialog. Via @siljander
Has anyone read the novel by Ian MacDonald, Cyberabad Days
Three Books on Afghanistan Reviewed
Times as complex as ours present us with huge moral dilemmas and require minds that receive constant sharpening, and sometimes news reports just don’t do.
Since the United States sent military forces after al-Qaida following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the political and cultural landscape of Afghanistan has been a daily feature in newspapers across America. But America’s involvement in Afghanistan predates Sept. 11 by two decades, and military engagement only begins to explain the relationship between the two countries. The following three books deepen our understanding of the news reports from Afghanistan.
Books reviewed:
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, paperback, 576 pages, Vintage
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban by Sarah Chayes, paperback, 400 pages, Penguin Press
Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag Goknar, hardcover, 96 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East: a new book edited by Nathan Brown and Emad Shahin, about “democracy and democratization in the light of regional realities rather than the wishful thinking of outsiders.” Contributors include Amy Hawthorne and Shadi Hamid.
(kind of expensive, even on Kindle)
At DailyKos, a lengthy and thoughtful review of Karen Armstrong’s A Case for God.
I have my copy of Children of Dust! Sorry, Quicksilver – you’re on hold.
Incidentally, copies of CoD bought via clicking the huge image of the book gracing Talk Islam serve to drop a few pennies in the Talk Islam coffers. So if you plan to buy, buy via here!
(unfortunately Kindle versions don’t count 
Charles Tripp says the politics needs to be put back into analysis of ‘Islamist politics’ in his review of Gilles Kepel’s Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East and Ali A. Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization.
German publisher cancels book ‘insulting Islam’:
Droste publishers dropped the book by author Gabriele Brinkmann entitled “To Whom Honor is Due” after she refused to change several passages, including one where a fictional character is portrayed making abusive remarks about the Koran.
MI5’s (official) secret history revealed:
[...]
“We thought if we had a history, we could assign to history all those allegations and stories that have been around, with someone not in the service making a professional judgment about what really happened,” [former MI5 director-general Stephen] Lander said. “And it would be possible not to have to be dragged back in the press or anywhere else to stories about the Wilson plot, or about whether we investigated John Lennon, or studied Mickey Mouse … or all the rest. The answer is, ‘Read the book.’ “
The biggest open secret is that MI5 kept a file on Harold Wilson. Unsurprising too that Margaret Thatcher wanted to use the agency to spy on trade unions. The most interesting and contemporary revelation surrounds ‘Islamist terrorism’:
The 1,000-page volume, published Monday, describes an organization that fought Hitler with stunning success but struggled to combat Soviet espionage during the Cold War and initially failed to grasp the threat from Islamic extremism.
Andrew claims MI5 was “slow to see the coming menace of Islamist terrorism.” The book says the agency’s then-head, Stella Rimington, had never heard the name al-Qaida until a meeting in Washington in 1996, during which MI5 representatives were “taken aback by the interest” in Osama bin Laden shown by the Americans.
I wonder if the links between the agency and figures like Abu Qatada are investigated in the book:
Britain ignored warnings — which began before the September 11 attacks — from half a dozen friendly governments about Abu Qatada’s links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him. Intelligence chiefs hid from European allies their intention to use the cleric as a key informer against Islamic militants in Britain.
Terry Eagleton is interviewed by The Immanent Frame (a blog you should read if you’re interested in religion).
Hussein Ibish blasts Irshad Manji for being an ‘anti-Arab racist’:
[...]
All trouble, real or imagined, “with Islam” in Manji’s account boils down to one central negative influence: the Arabs. Everything is their fault. Manji has virtually nothing positive to say about not only the Arabs in general or their culture (about which she seems blissfully ignorant) and almost nothing positive to say about any individual Arab either.
I haven’t read Manji’s book (better things to do with my time), but based on the passages Ibish cites, it really does look like an ignorant rant against Arabs. While it is true that with a little more understanding we can see how numerous cultures influenced what we broadly refer to ‘Islam’ (as a religious tradition, history, etc), she seems to have gone far too much in the other direction in stating there was almost no Arab influence, or whatever influence there was has been corrupting. This very notion is silly for any number of reasons, starting with the simple fact that Arabic is the lingua franca of Islamic religious tradition.
Her obsession with ‘desert Arabs’, based on Ibish’s citations, is stupid and an example of crude anti-Arab depictions. Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad — all Arab cities — are or were centres of learning and crucially cities in which institutions can develop, goods can be traded, and ideas can be exchanged, i.e. not empty deserts full of primitive savages.
What books, articles, etc are you reading at the moment?
(Apart from the question above or this sentence.)
Yahya has a review of a couple of books on Islamophobia, which also examine the definition of the term.
This is easily the best review so far of Chris Caldwell’s Eurabian tome written in patrician tones. It summarises Caldwell’s argument or points out its contradictions to its detriment:
Why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience?
His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants.
How can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity’s most inspiring legacy?
Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America’s culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe’s. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing.
But what can they do “to stem the implantation of Muslim culture” in Europe? Caldwell holds out three possibilities. One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French banlieues who shout “Fuck France!”: “Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?” A second possibility is conversion: “It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents.” About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: “The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred.”
I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood.
The Moor Next Door has a detailed review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents.
Christopher Caldwell’s new book continues to generate more reviews and responses: one from Bruce Lawrence; another from The Economist; a review of a review at Mondoweiss; and a review of the entire debate in the US and Europe at Religion Dispatches.
Fouad Ajami gets a free lesson from a reader of The New York Times.
Ali Eteraz has some thoughts on Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the BJP and his book on Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
This looks like an interesting read:
Carré’s insight is based not on the discovery of any new historical evidence, but on a novel way of perceiving the dialectics of Islamic existence; that is, not as the dichotomy of text and history, the antinomy of ideals and realities, but as the interplay of ‘governance’ and ‘law’ in the arena of laïcité, in the worldly domain where the political is not under the tutelage of the clergy. Traditional Islam, accordingly, has been ’secular’ without being ’secularist’; it has affirmed the this-worldly logic of politics and history but never accepted the state as sovereign or reduced faith to governance. Carré’s thesis, then, fiercely rejects Orientalist prejudices about Islam’s inherent incapacity to separate governance from sacred law and hence become modern, just as it boldly challenges all other Islamophobic claims that have been advanced in contemporary France in the name of sociology or secularism. Carré’s argument that is based on the lessons of Muslim history and actual praxis, thus, forcefully repudiates all those glib assertions about Islam’s (essential!) incompatibility with individualism, secularism, democracy and the rule of law!
Unfortunately, I can’t find an English translation.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has denounced a new book on Muhammad Ali Jinnah by Jaswant Singh, a senior party figure:
Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence says that Mr Jinnah has been “demonised in India”.
The book also holds former PM Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party responsible for the partition of India.
Mr Jinnah is a controversial figure in India and considered the architect of the partition.
The BBC’s India correspondent says that Jinnah is ‘admired’ by a number of senior BJP figures, but only cites one other name, LK Advani (who praised Jinnah on a trip to Pakistan; in my opinion that’s hardly controversial).
Conrad, what’s your view?
Yale University and Yale University Press barred the author of The Cartoons That Shook the World from including the actual cartoons in his book:
Pankaj Mishra has taken a bit of a beating on Talk Islam for his “apparently efficient anonymous overcomplex prose”. However, his essay on Eurabian fantasists and Europe’s anxiety over minorities, is worth wading through.
In one paragraph Mishra quotes from Christopher Caldwell’s extensively reviewed book, in which The Financial Times commentator discusses the spread of “Pakistani cuisine”:
Eurabia-mongers from America seem as determined as tabloid hacks to strike terror among white Europeans about their local newsagent or curry house owner. “If the spread of Pakistani cuisine,” [Christopher] Caldwell writes, “is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour.”
Caldwell is mad. Completely and utterly barking mad.
Talking of summer reads, I haven’t read A Case of Exploding Mangoes yet. An ribald satire on the Pakistan military by a former airforce man, Mohammed Hanif, turned journalist turned novellist, it has had good reviews in the Indie and the NYT. Has anyone here read it?
A book review of Gary Bunt’s iMuslims by Ziauddin Sardar which includes the odd claim below:
(Bunt is an academic who specialises in Muslim activity on the internet, so he sort of knows what he is talking about.)
Two positive reviews of Eurabian books in two weeks by The New York Times.
Is The New York Times trying to tell us something?