Islam and Its Discontents

"I would really recommend this book. If you are going to try to understand the Arab world, you certainly need some sort of understanding of Islam. And Islam is obviously a topic that has been discussed hundreds of time and there are excellent scholars who tried to put forward narratives of what went wrong. For example, you have Bernard Lewis with a book called, Islam: What Went Wrong ; Olivier Roy has a number of interesting ideas in different books, and there are many others. But for me the interesting thing about Abdelwahab Meddeb is that he redefined the question. He did not really focus on the flow of politics in the history of Islam as Bernard Lewis did. Nor did he focus on the psychology of the masses, ie how the strong Muslim became a weak Muslim. He basically followed the different philosophies that had come to dominate Islamic discourse over the centuries. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course there have been many divisions within Islam, many schools of thoughts, and some – though highly important – got marginalised, but he was looking at the main ideas that had governed general Islamic thinking throughout the ages. He didn’t do that objectively and that is important to know. He didn’t just tell the reader what that main dominant idea was at every single stage and then how it developed to the next stage. He actually took sides. He believed some were excellent and some were terrible. A key message in his book was that at one point in time Islam had a very positive governing idea, main flow of thinking, and that this line of thinking was very inclusive and was I think relatively tolerant; and then that idea and line of thinking was more or less sabotaged. He believed it happened roughly at the time when Islam was forced to defend its lands against the crusaders coming from the West and the Mongols coming from the East, and the key cannons of its schools of thinking became less courageous or perhaps more cautious. His thesis was that from that moment onwards Islam started to become less tolerant and the main philosophical ideas governing the Islamic discourse became intolerant and rigid. Whether you agree with him or not is not the most important point. What is interesting is that he traced that dominant philosophical thinking throughout the ages and presented it to you in a very succinct way. I think following his flow is very interesting for a Western reader who may not know much about Islam and probably has no time to really study it in detail. This simple short book gives you a succinct narrative."