As 2011 draws down, in a weirdly warm December (which, of course, is not an indication of any systemic transformations), I thought I’d share some of the most compelling reading I’ve done this year.
Naturally, many of these titles have something to do with Islam, my area of academic specialization. But all speak broadly to questions that concern religion and the religious, and I hope in noting them that our readers might find something surprising should the winter turn wintry. Because that is one of the gloomier season’s chief pleasures: Book. Fireplace. Hot drink. Blanket.
Here are my seven suggestions, in no meaningful order.
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1. The Submission
by Amy Waldman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
It’s rare to find a good novel about Muslims, and perhaps next to impossible to find an author who can help us rethink what happened to America in the years since September 11. Waldman has done it, crafting a story that foreshadows the furor over the “Ground Zero Mosque”; she goes from there to the questions we cannot answer, and perhaps never entirely should, about belonging, mourning, and healing. A delightful read.
2. The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
by Deborah Baker
Graywolf Press
Her name was Maryam Jameelah, but not originally. She ended up living beside and propagandizing for Mawlana Mawdudi, a rigid and unimaginative Pakistani ideologue, who championed a cold, inelastic Islam. Growing up, I knew of her through various books and pamphlets, all of them passionately, though crudely, cheering Mawdudi’s brand of Islam. I knew she was a convert, and as my scholarly interest in Islam developed (both personal and professional), I read much from her; quickly, though, I moved on, frankly bored by most of it.
I had no idea who she was. Shockingly, Maryam Jameelah is still alive, living—in a dull, harsh, even penal sense of the term—in Lahore, Pakistan; I hadn’t heard any differently, but never considered what had happened to her after her brief notoriety many years ago. You will devour this story of a Jewish girl from Long Island, unhappy, spiritually frustrated, alienated from herself, and exiled into a world not much more welcoming, never really sure why she went in, but pretty sure that she could never come out. If it says anything, I stepped into a Borders and read half of it one day, and went back the next day to read the second half.
This may also explain what happened to Borders.
3. In Defense of Flogging
by Peter Moskos
Basic Books
Moskos opens his surprisingly thought-provoking book with a shocking choice: if offered either several years in prison or several brutal lashes, which would you choose? Moskos makes the provocative suggestion that we should reintroduce corporal punishment as an option in some cases, for prison has systemically failed.
Our readers might most enjoy Moskos’ delving into the religious origins of much of our contemporary sense of punishment and justice. Beyond that, all must read this if only for its succinctly terrifying descriptions of a massive prison industry that sees America incarcerate more people, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population, than almost any other country in the world, including China.
Chew on that for a few minutes.
But for all his willingness to think outside the box, I found a truly disheartening passage in his conclusion. After spending pages describing the cruelty of our justice system, he makes the offhand point that at least what he is suggesting, however controversial, is not Shari’ah. Now, this is not a book about Islam. Nor is it a book that engages anything outside the American and American Christian experience.
And yet, nevertheless, Moskos thinks it fine to dismiss an entire legal tradition based on his clearly superficial knowledge of it; corporal punishment in Islamic law is discretionary, and stands only as the maximum limit to punishment. (The great introduction to what is, and is not, Shari’ah, has yet to be written.) Considering the nature of Moskos’ argument, how far he wishes us to travel in adopting his point, and how carefully he dissects many of our assumptions and aspirations, I only wish he could’ve shown the same thoroughness when considering the Islamic tradition.
There’s probably a lot here you’ll disagree with. But every once in a while, we should read something we want to dismiss out of hand.
4. Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & Company
Hand it to Lewis for making sense of the financial crisis through short, invariably captivating essays, each devoted to places like Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, and the United States. His descriptions of how the crisis unfolded differently in different places are powerful, easily digestible, and deeply aggravating.
In concluding, you will probably want to go and reoccupy Wall Street. My only qualm comes from the speed with which Boomerang was published. The book would’ve really benefited from more of an attempt to tie together its pieces into a larger narrative, and offer us some sense of where we might go from here. As it is, the conclusion left me surprised by its sudden nonchalance, and seemed to undermine the urgency with which the book was published.
5. Iqbal and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal
by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
African Books Collective
The author, whose work was first published in French, is one of my professors at Columbia University, and an advisor for my research. That said, I recommend it for the same reason I have chosen to study Muhammad Iqbal: because he was a profoundly influential poet, philosopher, and political thinker in South Asia and the Muslim-majority world, but he is largely unknown outside Muslim conversations.
Second caveat: This is not a book that will be easily accessible for those to whom contemporary Islamic thought, or South Asian philosophy, are familiar subjects. Nevertheless, the subject of this work, since Muhammad Iqbal has had a profound impact on contemporary Islam, far out of proportion to awareness of him in Western societies, this book is a tremendous introduction to a very fertile although often ignored topic.
To give you a sense of Iqbal’s reach, he is considered the intellectual and spiritual founder of Pakistan, he is widely studied in Iran, his poetry is loved and quoted in Turkey and Tajikistan, recognized by many Arabs, and the author of this work is himself from Senegal. An unfortunate provincialism keeps us from seeing the cosmopolitan nature of other traditions and knowledge and faith. Moreover, it is about time we saw the diversity within the Islamic tradition, and see modern Muslim philosophy not as an other, but part of broader global conversations.
6. The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
Viking
This is a novel about magicians. Obviously. And, perhaps, on the face of it, magic and religion do not ordinarily go together. More than that, this 2011 novel is the sequel to the wonderfully received The Magicians, for which reason I should rightly recommend both, thereby torpedoing any claim to chronological consistency or thematic rigor.
Grossman is a beautiful writer. He will keep you ever diverted from other, more pressing tasks (read: my dissertation). The Magicians and this sequel are about persons who understand magic and therefore see beyond what we experience in our ho-hum world; they begin at a kind of Hogwarts, but a far rawer and more damaged place, realized by the implications of being able to upend the order of things and mess with the world.
Their main character is Quentin Coldwater, ever wracked by questions of meaningfulness, purpose, and desire, whose coming-of-age story is no less moving simply because it is magical. But there is something else in both of these books that I want to highlight. It might be that Grossman is simply that good of a storyteller, that he can describe Quentin’s existential anxiety in such a way that we feel throughout both books a sense of unshakeable ennui. But…
Quentin searches for adventure compulsively, as might an aesthete for whom the pursuit of pleasure has become a tiresome obligation, with no farther aim; it may however be that it is Grossman’s own take on the world which surfaces beyond his plot. In this second novel, the turn to religion seems inevitable, though a bit surprising, but all the same invoked on the path of a spectacular adventure story whose very purpose speaks to our need for something beyond materiality while in that moment undermining the authenticity of that need, suggesting that going beyond the world often ends darkly, painfully, and leaves us more alone, and yet more fully ourselves.
7. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
by Manning Marable
Viking
Manning Marable was one of the greatest scholars of recent American history, and here has issued the sum of his research on Malcolm X’s life, interpretations of that life, and especially powerfully, the travesty that was the trial of his alleged assassins. Marable’s book is hefty, but throughout a pleasure to read; in it, you will find a thorough, unbelievably nuanced description of how the man and the myth of Malcolm X were created and sustained, all accomplished without a need to tear down the figure or shun him from our history.
With Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X was probably the most influential American Muslim; for that reason alone, his life must be better known, and this, along with Haley’s co-authored Autobigraphy of Malcolm X, is an excellent place to start. Tragically, Marable himself passed away only days before the publication of this bestselling work, but the impact it made—settling on the bestseller lists, for example—only underscores the scale of his scholarship, and the relevance it has to our world. Growing up, Haley’s Autobiography was profoundly influential in the formation of my own identity—along with Muhammad Iqbal’s own works, both sustained me when Maryam Jameelah and the Islam of ideology was quickly found wanting.
