BOOK REVIEW
What do Muslims around the world believe?
By Charles A. Radin | May 14, 2008
Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think
By John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed
Gallup, 230 pp., $22.95
John L. Esposito, professor of Islamic studies and international affairs
at Georgetown
University, is at the forefront of scholars representing Muslims to
Americans as benign
believers in the one God, people much like their cousins in Judaism and
Christianity in their
aspirations for peace, prosperity, and democracy.
Since the 9/11 attacks, he has produced several books exploring, in
reassuring tones, this
faith that so many now fear. His latest effort, "Who Speaks for Islam?:
What a Billion Muslims
Really Think," uses extensive polling by the Gallup Organization to make
the case that there is
no clash of civilizations, and that most frictions between the Islamic
world and the West could
be remedied by changes in US foreign policy.
The polling data contain much that is informative and thought-provoking.
The analysis by
Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, is
sometimes dead-on.
Sometimes, though, it wanders off into irrelevancy and apologetics.
No one who reads this book could come away puzzled about why moderate
Muslims fear and distrust
the United States. In Iran, the United States brought down the first
democratically elected
moderate Muslim government, in 1953. Since then, it has backed a seemingly
endless stream of
kings, dictators, and military strongmen in the Middle East, North Africa,
and South Asia.
Esposito's explanation of the difference between sharia and Islamic law is
illuminating and
potentially useful to would-be bridge builders from other religions.
Sharia he likens to a
compass, the divinely revealed truth that cannot change. Islamic law is
like a map drawn by
those holding the compass. It is the work of humans, and therefore subject
to change.
He makes much of the fact that moderates and reformers now are trying to
employ sharia to rein
in practices such as polygamy and female genital mutilation. However, he
fails to re****t
whether such efforts are succeeding.
Such omissions, coupled with a weak section on the advantages women enjoy
in Islamic society,
make him sound at points more like an apologist than a researcher. Or
maybe the co-authors got
carried away by all that polling data.
The vital question is not really whether a majority of Muslim women want
to wear the veil or be
cir***cised, but whether most Muslims, whatever their beliefs, sup****t the
rights of
minorities, within Islam or in other religious communities, to live
according to their own values.
Many intriguing questions suggested by the data go unaddressed. What does
it mean, for example,
that 58 percent of Saudi men say women should be allowed to vote, and at
the same time 55
percent say women should not be allowed to drive alone?
The authors simply do too much aggregating of the data, and too little
disaggregating. They
describe as a "surprising conclusion" their finding that Muslims "like
people of other faiths
are geographically, racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse."
This is certainly no
surprise to anyone who has tried to learn more about Muslims in the years
since 9/11.
The authors fail to identify the differences among these various Muslim
cultures on points of
concern to non-Muslims. For example, from where does the supercessionist
idea - that one's
religion represents the culmination and perfection of divine revelation,
and is destined to
dominate the world - draw its greatest strength among Muslims?
Such beliefs are not different, and probably not stronger, than the
supercessionist sentiments
among the Christians masterfully identified by James Carroll in
"Constantine's Sword."
It was an idea that led to centuries of religious wars and persecution,
culminating in the
Holocaust. Not to treat it in a book on who speaks for Islam is a grievous
omission.
Charles A. Radin, a former religion and Middle East correspondent for the
Globe, works on
international affairs programming at Brandeis University.
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
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