As Esposito explains in the introduction, his goal is “to understand the struggle for reform in Islam, to explore the religious, cultural, and political diversity of Muslims facing daunting challenges in Muslim countries and in the West, to clarify the debate and dynamics of Islamic reform, to examine the attempt to combat religious extremism and terrorism” – in that context – “to look into the future of Muslim-West relations.”

His conclusion?: “The future of Islam and Muslims is inextricably linked to all of humanity.”

What Esposito presents between that introduction and conclusion is one of the finest examples of the study of Lived Religion since Wilfred Cantwell Smith laid the foundations for that methodology. -- Tamara Sonn

In 1999, the Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui settled in France to escape Islamist terrorism. Since then, he has fought against every form of Islamism, often in an objective manner, but, on occasion, he has no qualms about engaging in polemics or provocation. Such is the case with his recently published comic book, a collaboration with the graphic artist Philippe Bercovici, entitled "Bin Laden Unveiled," and, as announced in the subtitle, makes no less a claim than being "a comic book assassination of al-Qaida." Sifaoui employs humour as his weapon to tackle the terror propagated by radical Islamists and to bring his reader to laugh at their most horrible traits – hate, barbarism, stupidity, and fanaticism. And there is another feature to add to this list, their supposed obsession with sex. The comic book alleges this to be one of the chief character traits of Bin Laden – and he isn't alone here. -- Joseph Croitoru

This fascinating book provides a general picture of the status and conditions of women in Muslim communities around the world faced with the challenge of Islamic scripturalist assertion. Shirazi admits that patriarchy is, of course, not a Muslim-specific phenomenon, but argues that the forms that it takes in Muslim communities and Muslim-majority countries makes it particularly problematic and difficult to oppose in that it is generally sought to be legitimised in the name of religion. Hence, challenging such patriarchy is a particularly arduous task as it is easily branded as a challenge to religion itself. -- Yoginder Sikand

Dr Nagi writes that Che, who had entered Bolivia to struggle against the system, was cold-bloodedly murdered by Bolivian agents of the US on October 9, 1967 after being captured, wounded but alive. To emphasise the poignancy of the murder, the author quotes a powerful couplet: “Jis sajh dhaj sey koi maqtal sey gaya woh shaan salamat rehti hei/Yeh jaan to aani jaani hei, is jaan ki koi baat nahin.” The couplet reflects the heroism of the sacrifice of one’s life for an ideal — a feat that Che achieved by struggling for his ideas until the very end. --Dr Amjad Parvez

The book explains, among other things, the background of the construction of the Kaaba. Before the advent of Islam, Christians and Jews prayed facing Masjid-e-Aqsa (the Al Aqsa Mosque in the holy city of Jerusalem, or Al Quds). This practice continued among Muslims in the early days of Islam. One day, when our Holy Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) was leading the prayers, he received Allah’s command to turn his face towards Makkah. -- Dr A Q Khan

In his book In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin depicts the pursuit of happiness in Pakistan, a society marked by feudalism. In particular, it focuses on the stories of women. In a society where they are often regarded as property, women see love as a kind of business. Claudia Kramatschek read the book. "Anyone who wants to understand Pakistan, should also understand feudalism"; Daniyal Mueenuddin's novel offers glimpses of a hitherto unknown world.....Every page of this collection of stories, which has won numerous awards and has been translated into more than 14 languages, bears witness to this love of the land. The reader can smell, taste and see it. Above all, Mueenuddin, who was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, yet grew up in Pakistan, conjures up characters made of flesh and blood from a world that is necessarily foreign to us, yet suddenly appears so near.

This is the story of the singing, dancing mujahideen that evolved into a dreaded inquisition squad which ran Afghanistan for five years, as told by Mullah Zaeef — who was once a high profile member of the said squad. But he is neither a defector nor an apologist and remains an ardent supporter of his former colleagues. Originally written in Pashto, his memoir has been translated by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn — permanent residents of Kandahar and apparently the only two westerners brave enough to live there sans elaborate security measures.

The man, who went from being a veteran and Talib to ambassador before ending up as Prisoner 306 at Guantanamo Bay prison, has a selective memory. “The Taliban had given beauty to the region,” he gushes, hastening to add some feel good stories and touching imagery to the terrifying mythology. He contrasts the world he inherited as a child raised under the shadow of the Soviets with the land he defended as a jihadist, and one he helped forge as a young Talib. -- Afrah Jamal

After moving to Lahore and serving as a sub-editor at the daily Mashriq, he spent 16 years in the Urdu Science Board, initially as research officer and later on as deputy director. After retiring from this post, Kolsri now works as a director at the Punjab Institute of Languages, Arts and Culture. He has penned numerous ghazals. A couplet in which he says that many children who come to the cities forget that their mothers had sold their jewellery to raise money for their education made Aslam Kolsri famous instantly. -- Dr Amjad Parvez

Born in a poor family in a village in Egypt in 1926, Qaradawi studied at Cairo’s Al-Azhar, then the largest seat of traditional Islamic learning, after which he shifted to Qatar as emissary of his alma mater. It was there, we are told, that Qaradawi established himself as a noted scholar and activist, traveling widely across the world and establishing a number of Islamic institutions. The editors provide a pen-portrait of a passionate, dedicated scholar-activist, seeking to revive the rapidly disappearing tradition of socially-engaged ulema, who Qaradawi believes, should lead Muslims in the twenty-first century.— Yoginder Sikand

Syafiq Hasyim, author of the recently-published Understanding Women in Islam—An Indonesian Perspective, works with the Jakarta-based International Centre for the Study of Islam and Pluralism, that has been at the forefront of efforts to evolve socially progressive and contextually relevant understandings of Islam, particularly as regards women and relations between Muslims and others. Last week, I read his simply unputdownable book in one single sitting. Hasyim’s principle contention is that while Islam regards men and women as ontologically equal, this has not been reflected in the Muslim historical tradition, noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding. Muslim historiography, theology as well as jurisprudence continue to bear the stamp of patriarchy, and Islamic discourse, generally speaking, continues to be heavily male-centric. All this has served to uphold patriarchal rule, which Hasyim contends, is un-Islamic—because male supremacism is akin to associationism or shirk, a heinous sin in Islam. -- Yoginder Sikand

For Muslims, as with followers of other monotheistic religions that make exclusive theological claims of representing the sole truth, this issue has continued to be deeply troublesome. The vexed relations between Muslims and others in large parts of the world owe, in part, precisely to this dilemma. This book, by an Indonesian Muslim scholar, marvelously addresses this problem head-on, critiquing exclusivist and supremacist understandings of Islam while seeking to explore alternate understandings of Islamic theological resources in order to develop an Islamically-grounded theology of harmonious inter-faith relations. Surveying the corpus of traditional Muslim jurisprudence or fiqh, Zainun Kamal argues that it is unable to accommodate the vital inter-faith question that we are today faced with. This is because, he writes, traditional fiqh is premised on an antagonism towards others and their truth claims, refuses to respect or even acknowledge them, and views other religions and communities with contempt. It actively seeks to discredit other religions completely, and so, obviously, is not conducive to dialogue and harmonious relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. Hence, there is an urgent need, Kamal says, to transcend the views of the earlier ulema on these matters by engaging in a process of creative, contextual interpretation or ijtihad in order to make fiqh formulations on inter-community and inter-faith relations relevant to our new context.

This, he cautions, might be wrongly portrayed by narrow-minded critics as an attack on the Islamic shariah itself, but he hastens to point out that this would be far from true, indicating the clear distinction between the shariah as the divine path, on the one hand, and fiqh as a cumulative, historical and human enterprise, on the other. While the former is immutable, the latter can, indeed should, change, based on the recognition that, being a human product, it is liable to error. Pre-empting his critics, he argues that we need to recognize that the fuqaha, scholars of fiqh, were products of their own times and contexts, and, hence, were not infallible. He castigates the tendency to glorify, as unchangeable and immutably Islamic, the corpus of medieval fiqh and its creators, calling for developing fiqh rules appropriate to today’s times, including on the issue of inter-faith relations. To refuse to do so, he rightly indicates, would only lead to further stagnation of Muslims and to widening the existing conflicts and suspicions between Muslims and others. -- Yoginder Sikand

Here and there in her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives you the impression that she is battling “Wahhabi Islam”, “radical Islamists”, “extremist Islam”. But just when you think you might be on the same page as her, she reverts to her emphatic Islam-itself-is-the-problem view. Ali loves Christians who no longer take every word of the Bible literally, perhaps allows for the fact that even holy text must be read in context. What she can’t stand for a moment, however, is the “tortuous struggle” of “intelligent and well-meaning (Muslim) men and women to reinterpret Muslim scripture”.

Ali selectively plucks a few passages out of the Quran to “prove” how Islam is a violent and anti-woman faith at its core: “Islam is not just a belief: it is a way of life, a violent way of life, Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.” Ali tells us she has no intention to convert, but for her any day it is “God” over “Allah” and compassionate Christianity over violent Islam. -- Javed Anand

Two famous saints of the 17th and 18th centuries, Shah Mohammad Kazim Qalandar and Shah Turab Ali Qalandar, come in for detailed discussion. Their texts — “Shant Ras” and “Amrit Ras” — have been made the object of a focused study. According to the author, Krishna emerges as the most shining symbol of the ‘quest for ultimate truth'. Muslim poets always look up to him for spiritual attainment and intellectual guidance. Their poetry betrays the equal measure of their love for Shri Krishna and the prophets. Tariq regrets that Shah Mohammad Kazim Qalandar and Shah Turab Ali Qalandar are not included in the list of Bhakti poets whose hero is Krishna though they have composed poetry even in Braj Bhasha. The book is braced to provide a complete understanding of the Indian mind and culture and its close affinity with Islamic tradition. It also makes it clear that Urdu poetry is invested with the tremendous potential to bind the whole nation together. -- Shafey Kidwai

Incidentally, nobody quite knows how many rubais Khayyam actually wrote. In the oldest extant manuscript, copied 500 years ago in Shiraz and now held in the Bodleian Library, there are 158. In later versions, succeeding scribes added more until the total swelled to nearly 1200. Edward Fitzgerald culled out the essential ones and rendered them in a free English translation, or as he called it a “transmogrification,” in 1859. He did not pretend to be too faithful to the original, often combining more than one rubai to make a brilliant whole that reads as one poem and not as separate epigrammatic quatrains. Incidentally, there was an Indian connection: his colleague, Prof. Edward Cowell discovered a Persian manuscript of the rubaiyat in the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and sent it to him. The resulting book went almost unnoticed and was soon in the one-penny boxes on the streets until it found admirers in the poets Rosetti and Swinburne (followed by Hardy, Elliot and Conan-Doyle) and went on to become one of the most famous, essential and oft-quoted books for the next 100 years. – Navtej Sarna

IS RELIGION FROM GOD OR MAN-MADE?

Fateh{puri@ believed in God, and there are various instances in his writings to prove that. However, he was not sure if God had anything to do with religion. As seen in the earlier instance, he tried to rationalize even the divine revelation, and showed that it was possible to see the Qur’an as the personal contribution of the Prophet. This was because, for Fateh{puri@, religion had a more utilitarian purpose, than spiritual. Religion, for him, was to serve as a guide for humanity, to remind them of doing good deeds, being kind to one another, and remembering God, while taking part in worldly pursuits and aiming for progress and success.

In reality, all religions of the world were made by humans and were not related to God, revelation or providence. The books that are said to be revealed, are the work of human brain only, and therefore, they have different thoughts and teachings according to different time and place. Neither does God need worship and submission, nor does He need anyone’s prayers.[ix]

Fateh{puri@’s thesis was that the reasons why some matters have either been forbidden or recommended by religion can be understood by human intellect. Therefore, it is quite possible to say that religious instructions might have been created by human intellect to serve a functional purpose.

IS THE QUR’AN REALLY GOD’S SPEECH?

As mentioned above, Fateh{puri@ believed that the only thing that could be proven was that the Qur’an came from Muh{ammad’s mouth; whether it was really God’s speech is debatable. The only justification of its divine origin generally given, according to him, was that the grammar, literary quality and style of the h{adi@th and the Qur’an differ markedly and therefore, they are speeches of different entities, the Prophet and God. Fateh{puri@ never found this rationale satisfactory enough to prove such a broad assumption. He agreed that, undoubtedly the Qur’an was truly an extraordinary book in all its aspects and that during that age, nothing like it in either length or quality was produced. However, he argued, it would be going too far to assume that nothing like it could have been produced. Arabic literature and poetry at the time was quite developed, and oral tradition was flourishing. And since Prophet Muh{ammad was related to the Quraish tribe, which was famous for its oral literature and fluency of expression, it should not be surprising that his language was extraordinarily refined.

Fateh{puri@ answered the question of the differences in style and quality of the two works by saying that one’s language and actions are determined by the emotion one is feeling, and its intensity. He gave the example of poetry. There can be quite a lot of variety in the different verses written by the same poet, some of them perhaps being of a higher literary quality than others. The reason, he thought, was that the poet reached a certain state of mind when he wrote those particular high-quality verses. Those verses that suddenly come into a poet’s mind, without any effort on his part, are even in literary circles called ilha@mi@ or revelatory.[vi]

Coming back to the Prophet and the Qur’an, his basic hypothesis was that the Prophet must have reached a certain state of mind, resulting in the revelation (wahy). He explained that, unlike his contemporaries, the Prophet was born with an acute discernment of good from evil. A person like him would naturally be upset with the situation in which he found himself. This, according to Fateh{puri@, prompted him to get out of his world, hide in caves and think. His deep thinking would lead him into such a state where he would start producing this message. Words burst forth like a spring. The words in that message were obviously his, and in the same language that was widespread during the time and in that area. The only noticeable change was in the style of presentation, which according to Fateh{puri@ was the result of his state of mind. That is what truly constitutes a revelation, according to Fateh{puri@. And this was what made the language of the Qur’an so different from that of h{adi@th.[vii]

W.C. Smith was clearly not an admirer of Fateh{puri@’s extreme logic; he did not like the fact that Fateh{puri@ attacked the very idea of divine revelation. “Accordingly, the Qur’a@n was seen as a piece of literature, the personal contribution of Muh{ammad to the thought of the world; all of authority, as well as the ritual and formalism, of the religion was rejected.”[viii]

STATUS OF THE PROPHET

Prophet Muh{ammad, according to him, was basically a reformer who was very concerned about the state of his society:­ its illiteracy, ignorance, social evils like polygamy, infanticide, drinking (etc.), its material culture and idol worship. After all, he sat meditating in a cave for weeks even before the advent of the revelation. Fateh{puri@ mused that he must have been thinking about ways to cleanse his society of its ills and it seems, Islam turned out to be a good way of doing so.

Although other modernists also made an effort to humanise the Prophet, not many would have agreed with him that the Prophet had a personal agenda in bringing about Islam. The Prophet might have been concerned about his society, and there must have been a reason why he used to go to that cave, but there is no reason why these two things should be related. Apparently Fateh{puri@ was venturing here into the realm of pure speculation.

Fateh{puri@ asked, “What is the position of the Prophet in Islam? Was he just a messenger, could anybody have become a messenger?” For him the choice of Muh{ammad as the Prophet was crucial. How Muh{ammad acted, how he lived his life, was a topic of primary importance for Fateh{puri. He considered it debatable whether the Qur’an is the speech of God or not, but it was historically proven, according to him, that it did come out of Muh{ammad’s mouth.[x] His earlier point that the Prophet might have had a reformist agenda of his own in bringing about Islam, and then his insistence that our only certain knowledge is that Qur’an came out of the Prophet’s mouth, amounted to placing a question mark on any involvement of God at all. This was one of the instances where he may have taken his logic too far, expressing views that clearly would not be acceptable to any ordinary believer. He appears an agnostic from these views, but seemingly this was not the case. He simply went wherever his logic took him and was not afraid of expressing radically different views. -- JUHI SHAHIN

Excerpts from a newly published book in Pakistan: The War Within Islam: Niyaz Fateh{puri@’s Struggle Against The Fundamentalists by Juhi Shahin