Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence

by Bruce B. Lawrence

Book Overview

Islam is often portrayed, especially in Western media, as an alien, violent, hostile, and monolithic religion, whose adherents are intent upon battling nonbelievers throughout the world. Shattering the Myth demonstrates that these conceptions more accurately reflect the bias of Western reporters than they do the realities of contemporary Islam. Westerners are barraged by images of violence that usually originate from armed confrontations...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691004870
• ISBN13: 9780691004877
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Islam is... Islams

... This work explodes the myth in reverse, of the alien,hostile, and monolithic Islam, and is both a corrective to a corrective and useful as a reminder of the dangers of one-dimensional reduction of any socio-historical complexity, most especially Islam where the journalist impressionism of accounts of terrorism lose sight of the endless rooms in a large labyrinth. There many things, like the legacy of Sufism, are not even visible to the naked eye. We seem left to repeat, 'Islam is this, or this'. The scale alone of Islam is tremendous, and the Middle East is but one star in this constellation, one should retell the tale of the blindmen and the elephant. There is an irony to world history that the world of Islam suffers the abstract cunning and mathematically economic jihad of westernization turned globalization, and as bedouins all we might note the curious genaeology of inheritance in both systems.This book was reviewed alongside Paul Fregosi's Jihad.