BOOK REVIEW

Two books offer a timely glimpse of Islamic culture, perspectives

By Scott Bernard Nelson, Globe Staff, 3/31/2003

Americans have historically paid about as much attention to other cultures 
as the good citizens of Rome did at the peak of their imperial influence 
1,900 years ago -- which is to say, not much. We live on the island of Pax 
Americana, and we tend to run a surplus when it comes to the import and 
export of culture.

That said, for the past 18 months Americans have been force-fed an 
increasing diet of images from the Muslim world. The focus, of course, 
came after the September 2001 day that religious extremists, fueled by a 
particularly puritanical and violent strain of Wahabi Islam, stunned the 
nation by hijacking four US airliners and flying three of them into 
buildings full of people.

Even so, there's a gulf between the way outsiders perceive a culture and 
the way a culture perceives itself. Specifically, the way Muslims perceive 
their own cultures takes on added importance for Americans as we fight our 
second war in as many years and face an era in which tension among the 
world's major religions has replaced the Cold War as a central engine of 
geopolitical trends.

Two new books give Western audiences a primer on Islam as well as a 
glimpse of how Muslims perceive their place in the world.

The first is a Cliffs Notes version of Islam written by a notable 
Iranian-American college professor. The second is a didactic collection of 
short stories written under the pseudonym David Gabriel -- a ham-handed 
reference to the highest-ranking angel of the Christian, Jewish, and 
Muslim faiths. The collection is thrown down like a gauntlet at the feet 
of secular America, designed to do anything but go down easily.

George Washington University professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, though, is not 
in the business of issuing challenges. The former graduate student at 
Harvard and MIT has written more than 50 books, as well as numerous essays 
and articles. ''Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization'' is his latest 
work, timed to guide Westerners gently through Islam 101.

Nasr was the dean of faculty at Tehran University and president of 
Aryamehr University, both in Iran, in the 1960s and 1970s. He founded the 
Iranian Academy of Philosophy and was a relatively high-profile 
intellectual in his native land until he was forced into exile by 
Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution.

His latest book is broken down into easily digestible bites, much like a 
college syllabus. It begins with a discussion of the basic tenets of Islam 
and a simple explanation of Sunnism, Shiism, and the geographic reach of 
what is frequently called the Muslim world today.

>From there, Nasr moves into brief discussions of Muslim rituals, 
practices, ethics, core beliefs, and core institutions. Finally, he uses 
broad strokes to paint a picture of Islam's history, schools of thought, 
and place in the contemporary world.

To Nasr's credit, he does not duck issues such as violence, human rights, 
religious freedom, and the September 2001 attacks, although his 
explanations will not sound convincing to many American readers. The 
point, though, is not to convince Americans of anything, but rather to 
explain what Islam is, from a Muslim perspective. At least at a surface 
level, it works.

''Making Peace With the Muslims'' is shallow, too, but less effective. The 
volume's seven stories feature what turns out to be a recurring theme of 
Americans (or, in a couple of cases, Americanized Muslims from Turkey or 
Egypt) obsessed with consumer culture and hollow to the core. Their lives 
are touched in various ways as they learn -- or relearn -- about Islam.

The writing is preachy and predictable, with few exceptions. One exception 
is the title story, saved for last and intended as an indictment of 
American meddling in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the story, an 
American Jew on the rebound from a broken relationship comes to heal in 
the Holy Land, only to fall in love with a Palestinian student at Hebrew 
University in Jerusalem. As the man is physically bloodied and slowly 
disabused of his naive peacemaking notions, readers are left with a sense 
of the depth of desperation and darkness of misunderstanding that often 
separate Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Despite the collection's gaping faults, it's a perspective worth 
pondering. There's a value to glancing in the cultural mirror occasionally 
to see just how you look to those with a different worldview.

Scott Bernard Nelson can be reached at nelson@globe.com.

This story ran on page A12 of the Boston Globe on 3/31/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.