Islam: The Straight Path - John Esposito

With the death of Osama Bin Laden an awareness was reawakened within me that I know frightfully little about Islam. I have long meant to read a sort of introductory text on the faith and history of the Muslim people and I think John Esposito's work served that purpose quite well. Esposito gives a very basic - 250 pages, roughly - rundown of the history of Islam into the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important thing he accomplishes is a cogent tying together of sectarian separations across time in Islam and how those continue to have very real implications for how people identify themselves and groups of Muslins interact.

Two takeaway points that I found particularly illuminating. First, because of where I grew up, Christianity is the baseline of comparison for how I conceive of religions. Thus I always analogized the Quran with the Bible. But that is not really true. If we think of the Bible as the foundation upon which Christianity is built, it is more accurate to say that the Quran is the house of Islam. The forced equivalency of the Bible and the Quran does a disservice to the role of the Quran. Second, because the Quran has a much stronger proscriptive history in Islam, much of what westerners see as conservativism is really a more public grappling with the intersections between western-style modernity and the role of morality in society. Certainly there is much wrestling among all people between morality and modernity, however, the western world likes to unfairly focus on the seeming disjuncture and clashes it has with Islam. Rather, we should turn the lens on ourselves and see what we cannot learn from any person who struggles to better understand their relationship to the world around them.

This provided me a much needed introduction to historical Islam and I will certainly follow this up with further reading.