As I read and reread this last work I became increasingly irritated by it until I finally threw my copy at the wall in exasperation. I have since bought another copy with an introduction to the third edition which is revealing and, I think, justifies my disillusion.
Longform
The bad news, Berman argues, is that this irrationality is not restricted to a small faction of extremists, but is harboured by broad currents of Islamists and nationalists. In a sense, every Muslim or Arab is a potential Islamist or Baathist, and any of those is a potential terrorist. So we must prepare for an endless war against this implacable enemy.
When you know the origins and purpose of fear it may indeed be possible to dispense with the fear of fear itself in favour of something better.
I always thought that Islam is something in which you either believe, or you don’t believe. If you want to call yourself a ‘Muslim’, it’s sort of an all-or-nothing deal. You’re either in or you’re out.
Judaism and Islam are in many ways the closest of cousins. Sharing a rigorously monotheistic faith as articulated by a shared canon of prophets in related Semitic tongues, tracing their common origins to the patriarch Abraham, their destinies have been inextricably intertwined.
The introduction of critical thinking into religious discourses has always been controversial and not exactly risk-free.
I have a religion, and I call my religion Islam. I call myself a Muslim. But the truth is that I’ve made up Islam for myself. If this matters, if someone making up their own Islam seems unreasonable, you can skip past these pages.
An unashamed Orientalist fantasy, Sex and the City 2 was contemptuous in its portrayal of Muslim men as misogynist while depicting Islamic society – through the oh-so-representative prism of Abu Dhabi – as repressed and oppressive.
Is Islam an imperial idea, forever beholden to the perpetuation of a historical order to which ‘conquering the world’ is intrinsic?
Muslim cosmopolitanism seemed to me the most natural of dinner table topics. But my family and friends around the dinner table had other ideas.