Khaled Abou El Fadl

This was our first book for the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club. It is a nice collection of essays by the big guns of Muslim intelligensia around the topic of tolerance.

There are enough different opinions expressed in this book that we thought it would make a great discussion: readers could champion the essayist whose opinion was closest to their own.

What we didn't know at the time is that Muslims don't read - especially Muslim men. As a friend of ours in the publishing industry said, "When age matched for education and income with their non-Muslim peers, Muslims do not read as much." So if you are a Muslim here on librarything.com, know that you are, indeed, a very rare bird.

Our book club was co-ed, and we did find that the women would read the book. The idea was to have families get together, pot-luck dinner followed by the kids playing in the basement or second floor while the adults talked about the book.

The women read the book but said very little. The men didn't read the book, but gave their opinions freely. At least for the first session we had a good turn-out, which could probably be explained by mere curiousity, like the freak show at the circus. This gave my husband and I the very false hope that something like this could actually work. Little did we know.....… (lisätietoja)

"...I can recommend everything that Khaled Abou El Fadl has ever written. He has written great books on tolerance in Islam. His view is that extremists have hi-jacked his religion, and he presents an alternative, tolerant version of Islam. There is an argument going on in Muslim communities about whether or not a reformation, a revival of Islam is needed. He is the person to discuss this – he is educated in Islamic law, theology and jurisprudence and it would be great for people to read this book and to see that there is a push-back within the Islamic community against extremism. He has the background to give him authenticity and authority within Islam.

The extremists used to have a fringe, cult-like thing about them, but they have spread very successfully because al Qaeda and other groups like that have made arguments to people who don’t have the education to counter them. Surveys in Europe have shown that the people most likely to be radicalised are those with no religious training or background, because they have no inoculation against the extremist arguments...." (reviewed by Mary Habeck in FiveBooks).



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/mary-habeck-on-terrorism… (lisätietoja)