Category Archives: Books You Should Read

Islam’s Beginnings

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Scholars

Islam’s beginnings

Mohammed’s early movement was a surprisingly big tent, says historian Fred M. Donner

By Thanassis Cambanis, The Boston Globe, May 2, 2010

The first followers of Christ didn’t consider themselves ’’Christians’’; they were Jews who believed that a fellow Jew named Jesus Christ was the long-awaited messiah. It took centuries for Christianity to evolve and solidify as a distinct faith with its own doctrine and institutions.

In ’’Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam,’’ University of Chicago historian Fred M. Donner wants to provide a similar back story for Islam — a religion which, in the popular imagination, sprang wholly formed from the seventh-century sands of Arabia. Mohammed preached at the juncture of the Roman and Sassanian empires, winning support from Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and various deist polytheists. According to Donner, Mohammed built a movement of devout spiritualists from many faiths who shared a few core beliefs: God was one, the end of the world was near, and the truly religious had to live exemplary lives rather than merely pay lip service to God’s laws. It was only a century after Mohammed founded his ’’community of believers” and launched the great Islamic conquest that his followers started to define their beliefs as a distinct religious faith. Continue reading Islam’s Beginnings →

Donner 1, Lewis 0

Books You Should Read, Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Muhammad


[Note: The following is a perceptive review of two recently published books:
FAITH AND POWER: Religion and Politics in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis
(Oxford University Press, 2010) and MUHAMMAD AND THE BELIEVERS At the Origins of Islam by Fred M. Donner (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2010). The latest same-old stuff by Lewis can be consigned to the dustbin but Donner should be carefully read by a wide audience.]

by Max Rodenbeck, The New York Times, June 27

In the United States, a country saturated with instant punditry, serious scholars rarely attain celebrity as public intellectuals. Yet Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, has long radiated influence far beyond his specialization in Ottoman studies. A friend of Henry Kissinger and a mentor to subsequent cohorts of conservative policy makers, Lewis arguably has done more than any Mideast expert to mold American attitudes to the region.

His latest book, “Faith and Power,” a collection of essays, lectures and speeches from the past two decades loosely linked to the theme of relations between Islam and the state, reminds us why. Lewis is a fine writer, with a commanding authorial voice that sweeps magisterially across the ages. His linkage of diverting historical anecdotes to pressing current issues and his skill at contracting complex ideas into clever apothegms do much to explain his appeal to politicians in search of a punchy quote. Continue reading Donner 1, Lewis 0 →

Yosef Tobi at Hofstra

Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Judaism, Scholars, Yemen, Zaydi

Professor Yosef Tobi of Haifa University will be presenting a talk entitled “The Legal Status of the Jews in Muslim Yemen, 897-1948” at Hofstra University on Tuesday, April 27 at 9:35 am in 201 Barnard Hall. This lecture is sponsored by the Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Program and the program in Jewish Studies at Hofstra. Dr. Tobi is one of the leading experts on the history of Yemenite Jews and has written several important books on the topic, including The Jews of Yemen: Studies in their History and Culture (1999).

For a review of Dr. Tobi’s The Jews of Yemen, click here.

For an article by Dr. Tobi entitled “THE CONTRIBUTION OF YEMENITE
JEWISH WRITINGS TO YEMENITE HISTORY” click here.

Ann Dunham and Indonesia

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Development, Indonesia

Last fall Duke University Press published the Ph.D. thesis of S. Ann Dunham, President Obama’s mother, who just happened to be an anthropologist. I can certainly sympathize with the editors, as my own dissertation also bordered on the 700 page level (which may be one reason it was never published as a book). Details on the book can be found at Duke University Press. But I attach here a valuable account by Michael Dove for the New York Times last August.

Dreams From His Mother

By Michael R. Dove, The New York Times, August 10, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s late mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, was famous for the good cheer and optimism that she preserved in the face of a complex and challenging world. Her personality went hand-in-hand with her career as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Pakistan, where she studied and worked with village craftsmen, slum-dwellers and countless others. I knew Dr. Soetoro as a friend and colleague for many years before her death from cancer in 1995. Though I only met her son once, briefly at her memorial service, I’ve watched him as he’s taken on the hardest job in the world, and often found myself wondering how her worldview might have shaped him. Continue reading Ann Dunham and Indonesia →

Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men

Books You Should Read, Languages, Muhammad, Qur'an


David Powers of Cornell University has recently published what is sure to be a controversial analysis of early redaction of the Qu’ran. This is his
Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He provides a discussion of the book on Rorotoko, the first part of which I attach here.

Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men is about the Islamic assertion that Muhammad was the last in a series of prophets sent by God to mankind in order to facilitate human salvation. This assertion is mentioned once in the Qur’an, in verse 40 of chapter 33 (“The Confederates”). Here, addressing an unidentified audience, the voice that controls the text announces, “Muhammad is not the father of any of your men but the Messenger of God and the Seal of Prophets.”

The meaning of the phrase “Seal of the Prophets” (in Arabic, khatam al-nabiyyin) is equivocal. Some early Muslims understood this phrase as signifying that Muhammad confirmed the revelations sent previously to Moses and Jesus, while others understood it as signifying that Muhammad brought the office of prophecy to an end, that is to say, he was the last prophet. By the end of the first century AH, the latter understanding had come to prevail.

The assertion that prophecy ends with Muhammad is central to the claim that Islam supersedes Judaism and Christianity. It is understandable that this doctrine is taken for granted by Muslim scholars. Less understandable is the general neglect of this doctrine by students of Islam.

In Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men, I attempt to shed light on the emergence of this key theological doctrine and to show how the Islamic foundation narrative was constructed in order to assure its integrity. Specifically, I focus on the intersection between the theological assertion, on the one hand, and the collective memory of the early Muslim community, key legal institutions, and the text of the Qur’an, on the other.

For the full article, click here.

On the honor of being dissed

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Orientalism

About two and a half years have passed since my Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid was published by the University of Washington Press. Being an academic book, as opposed to a short-life trade paperback written for anyone who might have failed Middle School English, the reviews have come in a trickle rather than due to a publisher’s promotional media torrent the week of launch. One of the first reviews came in the TLS from Robert Irwin, one of the most qualified reviewers and an astute student of Orientalism himself. Irwin found that my book is “closely argued” and “makes for exhilarating reading,” despite the annoying (intentionally so) stream of puns. I appreciate a thorough German review by Siegfried Kohlhammer, who was kind enough to remark: “Jede Verteidigung von Orientalismus wird sich mit dieser sorgfältigen und präzisen Summa der Said-Kritik auseinandersetzen müssen.” In Common Knowledge, David Cannadine continues sweet music to an author’s ear by concluding that my book “is an important and impressively documented work, which deserves a wide audience.”

But now along comes a review that is breathtaking (I tend not to breathe when I am convulsed in laughter), however, one that I am honored to receive. The venue is telling: the Middle East Forum, which is affiliated with the websites of Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes and Islamist Watch. Were I to receive a favorable review from this forum-idable group, I could only conclude that my book was an utter failure and would be tempted to buy back all the existing unsold copies for a large Obsession-triggered book burning. I can now breathe a sigh of relief that a site defending the offensive opinions that I set out to counter has seen fit to dismiss my book as an uninformed and witless screed. Continue reading On the honor of being dissed →

Why does this land make me quiver?

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Israel, Journalism and Media, Palestine, Photography

[Webshaykh’s note: Carol Spencer Miller (1954-2004) worked as a photojournalist in the Middle East, covering the crises there for some of the major American and european journals and newspapers. She had access to the elites, including King Hussein and Yassir Arafat, as well as ordinary people. Although she died before publishing her reflections on this experience, her book has been edited by her sister as Danger Pay: Memoir of a Photojournalist in the Middle East, 1984-1994 and is now available as an intriguing first-person memoir of events that seem to recycle more than disappear from the news cycle. I provide here an excerpt about her feeling of disorientation reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian issue.]

It grows increasingly unclear to me why people call this a “Westernized” country. the phones don’t work, the press is censored, there are guns everywhere. I am perpetually uneasy. How, I wonder, can anyone relax when wherever you look, there is someone toting or pointing a machine gun? they casually rest across shoulders, carried by anybody who wants to. Will I get used to the sight of civilians wearing sandals, shorts, T-shirts, and Uzis. in movie theaters, at the supermarket, at shopping malls, and at bars? They aren’t frightening as much as disconcerting.

This is a difficult country to get accustomed to. There are bomb shelters in homes and children’s playgrounds, security at every store, the ever-present notion of “security reasons,” the way people dress, as if they don’t give two hoots about appearance (they don’t). Restaurants and movies open on Fridays are stoned by the ultra-Orthodox Haredim. Continue reading Why does this land make me quiver? →

More on the Danish Cartoons

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Danish Cartoon Controversy

What the Danish Cartoon Controversy Tells Us About Religion, the Secular, and the Limits of the Law
By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Religion Dispatches, January 7, 2010

Review of: Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (University of California Press, 2009)

This very rich little book seems to me a very good place to begin the new decade. It is smart, informed, thoughtful, urgent—and properly unsettling. It is also very difficult to read quickly or to summarize in short order. It is well worth the effort.

The principal essays, by anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, take the Danish cartoon controversy as a starting point. They review the contexts of the publication of the satirical cartoons of Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, and the angry responses that ensued; they ask us to take seriously the fundamental incoherence of the assumptions about religion that underlie the dominant narratives of those events (dominant narratives that were repeated again this week in the stories about a recent attack on one of the cartoonists.) The book also includes an introduction by political scientist Wendy Brown and a response to the essays by philosopher Judith Butler. Continue reading More on the Danish Cartoons →