surprisingly moving chronicle of in- unseen worlds tellectual and political flourishing in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran—“the brain of Islam”—in the nineteenth and Islam’s forgotten reformation twentieth centuries. We trail some extraordinary figures, each of whom By Yasmine Seale sought to integrate Islamic and Euro- pean ideas: Rifaa al-Tahtawi, Egypt’s “forward-thinking mandarin,” the Discussed in this essay: first Arab to use the word jumhuriyya (“republic”); the gay savant Hassan The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to al-Attar, who, between prolific writ- Modern Times, by Christopher de Bellaigue. Liveright. 432 pages. $35. ings in defense of logic and astrono- The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, by Cemil Aydin. my, enabled the first official dissec- Harvard University Press. 304 pages. $29.95. tion in Egypt; the polymath ˙Ibrahim The Story of Reason in Islam, by Sari Nusseibeh. Stanford University Press. 288 Sinasi,¸ who released Turkish poetry pages. $29.95. from its “dungeon of precedent”; Mir- Letters to a Young Muslim, by Omar Saif Ghobash. Picador. 272 pages. $22. za Saleh Shirazi, “bookworm and xenophile,” who put out Iran’s first arly in January 1989, a man who How do we talk about Islam? The newspaper; Besir¸ Fuat, “ardent Vol- Ehad led a revolution wrote to a ways are few and narrow. One in- tairian,” who penned a real-time ac- man who was trying to bury volves prefacing discussion of any as- count of his own suicide; Halide Edib one. “Mr. Gorbachev!” the letter pect of its civilization, however an- Adıvar, who wrote a futuristic novel said. “Reality must be faced.” Three cient or arcane, with caveats about about the rise of the Turkish nation emissaries were sent to , where present horrors committed by a few before helping to usher those visions for two hours they made the case that in its name. No doubt such remarks into reality; and Ali Shariati, “Iran’s Marxism had failed to meet “the real are an acknowledgment of confusion, space-age Luther.” needs of mankind.” The Western world, of the difficulty of thinking through Belying his simplistic subtitle (The on the other hand, offered nothing but a complex subject outside the terms Struggle Between Faith and Reason), de vulgar materialism. They proposed an set by the news cycle. But they are Bellaigue spins a web of tensions. One alternative, a way “to help fill up the also, I suspect, a shibboleth, a Ma- strand sets subtle minds such as these ideological vacuum of your system.” sonic handshake meant to convey against “Islam’s progressive autocrats,” After some thought, the secretary- that one is on the right side of dark- those “impatient transformers” who general of the Communist Party po- ness. I know of no other issue that re- sought to modernize by force. Tahtawi litely declined the Iranians’ invitation quires the affirmation of basic decen- spent much of his career “at the mercy to embrace Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini, cy before debate can take place. of viceregal whim.” Namık Kemal, on hearing the news, was disappointed. Four new books get this rhetorical whose vision for a parliament in Istan- He had wanted, he said, “to open a move out of the way early on. They bul would have a formative effect on door from the unseen world” to the also, by various means, attempt to his country’s politics, lost years to ex- Russian people. stretch the straitjacket. They speak ile. Reform-minded despots saw their In historical terms, this story is a in different voices—personal, popu- efforts thwarted in turn by recalcitrant footnote, but it, too, seems to open a larizing, academic—but have in mullahs: Amir Kabir, Iran’s merciless door from the unseen world. What if common a kind of restlessness, a side modernizer, “could no more than nib- Gorbachev had said yes? After his fall shuffle, a desire to take the way we ble at the clergy’s judicial powers.” from power, he expressed regret at not talk about Islam off-piste. And despite Sultan Mahmud’s persis- having given the offer more thought. tent efforts against the plague, it took In any case, the prospect of mass So- ith The Islamic Enlighten- the intervention of the highest- viet conversion is less interesting than Wment, Christopher de Bel- ranking cleric, around 1850, to con- the encounter itself. As an improba- laigue, the author of several vince the people of Istanbul of the ble meeting of two systems often fine books on Turkey and Iran, sets out benefits of quarantine, which, “with a thought to be rigid and unreformable, to correct a mistaken belief. “Islam suddenness that must have been stun- it warns us against thinking too rigid- needs its Enlightenment,” goes the ning,” eradicated the disease. ly ourselves. Khomeini was talking, of refrain; “Islam needs a Reformation, a We learn about changing attitudes course, about the hidden world of be- Renaissance and a sense of humour.” toward slavery and sex, the education lief. But more than that remains un- In fact, he writes in his introduction, of women and the dilution of faith seen today; the episode encourages us those who call for such reforms “are (“the human intellect was elbowing the to look for other doors. opening the door on a horse that bolt- divine Creator aside”). From the middle ed long ago.” of the nineteenth century, however, Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator What follows is an account of the “the promise inherent in Western based in Istanbul. horse’s journey: a stylishly written, knowledge was offset by the terrifying

82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2017 advance of the European powers”— since the death of Queen Victoria can trast, Antoine Clot, the physician who the French into Tunisia in 1881, the a book have resorted so often to the set up a school of midwifery in Egypt, British into Egypt the following year, word “benighted.” The cosmopolitan is simply “the civilising Frenchman.” to say nothing of the Anglo–Russian inhabitants of Alexandria are “half- My larger complaint, however, is one contest that destabilized much of breeds,” Cairo “an untameable bazaar less of tone than of framing. For in that Asia—and the narrative homes in of ideas,” the political theory known as magical word, “modernity,” lies a shaky on the struggle for Muslim self- Ottomanism “an exotic big yurt ar- conceit shored up by a bewildering array determination against imperial en- rangement.” The following sentence of metaphors. “Jane Eyre is modern,” croachments. In other words, it be- would not have been out of place in a and so are “the potato, kerosene lamps, comes a story about the politics of piece of fin-de-siècle reportage: wire nails and sewing machines,” pianos resistance, which increas- and blotting paper, rifles and ingly involved the assertion bow ties. Modernity is some- of global Muslim unity thing you might “manipu- against colonial incursions. late” or “delay” but that “no This line of thought, known one” could “stop,” something as pan-Islamism, was at first you could “teeter on the edge scant on theology; later it of,” “miss out on,” or, if you would develop a fundamen- were lucky, be “smiled on by”; talist branch. it is a “wave,” a “race,” a In their use of new tech- “sprint,” an “animal,” a “call” nologies, mass mobilization, that “cannot be unheard” and concepts such as justice and “quivers in the air,” a and progress, these militant “contagion,” a “hothouse,” a movements were as modern “blast.” It has “many faces.” as the ideas they opposed This haziness leads to (“To its intense irritation, Is- some strange contortions. lamism itself was shot Coercive reformers “set up through with Enlightenment new, modern institutions values”), but the politicization but the ethos inside them of religion sits uneasily within was not always modern.” the terms de Bellaigue has set Rifaa al-Tahtawi was by any himself. The rise of pan- standards a remarkable Islamic thought is told with man, but was Egypt really care, but to call it a “counter- “a country whose modern Enlightenment” is mislead- meaning he can be said to ing. He writes that “from a have invented”? And then defensive starting point the there are the flights of raw modern Islamic world became enthusiasm: “Who could a poor producer of original resist the power of autono- ideas,” which is another way mous judgment encour- of saying that when your aged by the printed news- country is being occupied, sci- paper, or fail to hear in the ence and philosophy might tick of a modern watch the not be your first concerns. reordering of time itself?” Upheavals of thought Who indeed? I couldn’t have an austere drama, help but identify with the which de Bellaigue conveys illiterate porters who are with flair. In what might have been a It does not escape the attention of in- said to have accosted Rıza Tevfik, thicket of isms it is hard to find a dull quisitive Westerners who travel to Mus- one of the Young Turks who restored sentence. The Suez Canal was “a bone lim countries that for the people there the dormant Ottoman constitution with one end in ’s maw and the the challenge of modernity is the over- in their revolt of 1908. other in Britain’s,” Dolmabahce Palace whelming fact of their lives. in Istanbul “a neoclassical meringue “Tell us what the constitution means,” with all the mod cons.” This is history This affable condescension extends the porters yelled. Tevfik replied, “Constitution is such a great thing in the grand style: men “hurdle” seas, to physical descriptions: one ruler is that those who do not know it are “vault” mountains, and “sire” incredible “corpulent, generously moustachioed, donkeys.” “We are donkeys!” the por- numbers of children. De Bellaigue cor- forbidding,” another is “massively ters roared back good-naturedly. rectly warns us “against taking oriental- bearded, bejewelled, mega-fecund.” ist writing on trust,” though he does Huda Shaarawi, the campaigner for Perhaps it would be better to resign not always follow his own advice. Not women’s rights, is “beautiful.” By con- oneself to donkeyhood. But when

The Astronomy Lesson, ink and gold on vellum, Ottoman Empire, fifteenth century © Leemage/Bridgeman Images REVIEWS 83 modernity encompasses everything years old. In The Idea of the Muslim support for Greek independence, from vaccination to warfare, it is hard World, from which that anecdote is achieved in 1830, and the French in- not to ask what exactly is being cele- lifted, the historian Cemil Aydin vasion of Algeria the same year. In brated. For to argue, as de Bellaigue attempts a “critical genealogy” of a 1833, the Algerian scholar Hamdan does, that “for the past two centuries notion often taken to be timeless. In Khodja wrote an anti-imperial tract Islam has been going through a pained fact, he argues, Muslims had not (in French) arguing that “destruction yet exhilarating transformation” is dreamed of political unity until the of Muslim lives and institutions con- merely to make the case that Muslims, arrival of European imperialism in flicted with the noble universal val- too, are part of history, that the nine- the nineteenth century. This book ues France espoused.” teenth century brought disorder, im- covers the same period as The Is- In Aydin’s telling, the idea of the provement, and trauma to their lives as lamic Enlightenment, but Aydin would Muslim world began in response to it did to others’. It is only a slight exag- dispute that the principal struggle of imperial racism, not to empire itself. geration to say the implicit claim of this that time was between faith and rea- Most Muslims, whether under Euro- book is that Muslims are not martians son. He contends that the impor- pean or Ottoman rule, were loyal after all: they aspire—who would have tance of Islam in politics derives from subjects; what they sought was fair thought?—to the same freedoms, are the imperial tactic of ordering hu- treatment, not secession. But this receptive to the same ideas, and, given manity by race and the strategies of world order soon came under pres- the chance, are capable of the same resistance to it. He agrees that a “ref- sure: Aydin points to the Russo– achievements as anyone else. That ormation” did take place, but main- Turkish War of 1877 as a turning these assertions, which border on the tains that it consisted of “fixing the point, when distinctions of faith tautological, can be passed off as a de- content and principles of Islam” in and race came to overshadow impe- fense of Islam against its detractors is order to create a united front. As fol- rial logic. En glish liberals like Glad- perhaps a sign of the current political lowers of a unified, universal religion, stone spoke of saving Christians climate in the West. But “assumptions Muslims were then in a stronger posi- from Muslim oppression (he called of wilful Muslim backwardness,” wrong tion to appropriate and respond to Ottomans an “anti-human specimen as they are and widespread as they may “secular European ideologies” like of humanity”), a new breed of West- be, should not be the only way of fram- the Enlightenment. ern journalists reported on the war ing the history of Muslims. The word “ideology” is important. with a pro-Christian bias, and Indi- In February, de Bellaigue pub- Although de Bellaigue spends a lot an Muslims mustered “unprecedent- lished a digest of his book in the of time identifying where Muslims ed levels of humanitarian senti- Guardian under the title “Trump’s drew on and fell short of Enlighten- ment” on behalf of Muslim victims. Dangerous Delusions about Islam.” ment principles, he leaves unexam- The Ottomans had been a de facto To the bigots in the White House he ined the conditions from which member of the European club of em- offered the “picture of a those principles arose in Europe. pires; now they became identified that embraced many aspects of mo- Reason and Progress are seen as fixed with a distinctive Muslimness. dernity,” which rich tableau “should stars to whose orbit he has added a A new style of empire was emerg- give the lie to the caricature of cen- benighted planet, leaving the cos- ing, “starkly inflected by race.” From turies of incurable Islamic stagnan- mology intact. His project falters the 1880s, as the Muslim press be- cy.” The hope seemed to be that if where it takes the Enlightenment on came more vocal about the rise of only the ideologues in government its own terms, rather than as a his- racism, both in colonial administra- and their followers got wind of the torically contingent phenomenon tion and in the treatment of the Ot- Islamic Enlightenment—railroads! like any other. Aydin’s approach toman Empire by Western powers, periodicals! quarantine!—maybe corrects this astigmatism. But to the idea of Muslim unity took on an they wouldn’t hate Muslims so much. him, the ideas that Muslims defined anti-imperial color. Missionaries, If only Steve Bannon knew that one themselves against were not so whose activity increased dramatical- of the grand muftis spoke French much those of the Enlightenment as ly in India during this time, were a with a Parisian accent, maybe we of Christian nationalism. European central part of this process. It was could all be friends! But to suggest sympathy for Christian self- they who began to articulate the that anti-Muslim feeling can be put determination in the mid-nineteenth idea of Muslims as racially distinct down to ignorance of Islam’s liberal century, just as the Continent’s great and inferior. Muslim scholars, in an “moment” is, I think, to err twice: it powers were ramping up colonization attempt to counter these assertions, ennobles modernity as a cure-all, elsewhere, made clear the gulf be- positioned Islam as enlightened and and it misunderstands the nature tween imperial norms and practices. tolerant—and Muslims as therefore and history of racism itself. Many Muslims wondered why Euro- racially equal to their Western over- peans could celebrate the liberation lords. Instead of rebutting the claim hen Khomeini wrote his of their fellow Christians in the Ot- that Muslims were racially homoge- Wletter to the Soviets “on toman Empire while they themselves neous, as might have been expected, behalf of the Muslim had to submit to foreign control. No- they essentialized Islam on their world,” the very idea of such an en- where was this more apparent than own terms. The word “Islam” rarely tity was no more than a hundred in the contrast between European appears in book titles before this pe-

84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2017 riod, but after the nineteenth centu- Winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction ry “it is everywhere.” Rather than focus on Egypt, Tur- key, and Iran, Aydin shifts his cen- “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel ter of gravity east, to India. Al- Manar, the most influential beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that pan-Islamic journal of the time, was is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand published in Cairo, but its largest source of funding was Indian Mus- a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, lims. There are some fascinating THE LEAVERS IS REQUIRED READING.” pages about Abdullah Quilliam, an early British convert to Islam who —ANN PATCHETT argued that his country, as the big- gest Muslim empire in the world (in the 1880s, the British ruled half the world’s Muslims), should partner with the Ottomans. Quilliam’s ac- tivities in the 1890s landed him an invitation to Istanbul from the Ot- toman sultan Abdülhamid II, who asked him to deliver a medal to a Nigerian Muslim who had built a large mosque in Lagos. Thus his faith became linked to the geopoli- tics of the caliphate. When his mosque in Liverpool was targeted by protesters, Quilliam was disturbed that “the overwhelming majority of British Muslims were loyal to the Crown, yet British public opinion . . . was dominated by threatening vi- sions of Muslim disloyalty and barba- rism,” when it was the British forces, like those who conquered Sudan in the 1890s, that violated Muslim dig- nity and rights. The period from the 1860s to the ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED NOVELS OF 2017 1920s was, Aydin writes, “one of the Entertainment Weekly • Time • Bustle • Buzzfeed • The Millions • Nylon.com most prolifi c and productive in Mus- lim thought across every discipline.” Works in , Persian, Turkish, “Courageous, sensitive, and perfectly of this moment.” and Urdu were rapidly translated from one language to another. Out —BARBARA KINGSOLVER of this intellectual ferment emerged a new historical consciousness. In “The Leavers feels as relevant as ever as the future the early nineteenth century, em- pires had been the main agents of of immigrants in America hangs in the balance.” political history, but a hundred years later, civilizational conflict —Time.com was “the principal lens through which global history was under- “Stunning . . . A fresh and moving look at stood.” In this view, Islam and the West were stable entities locked in the immigrant experience in America.” eternal confl ict. —Publishers Weekly, starred review Another popular subject of this era was Islamic civilization itself. Muslim intellectuals also responded to the claims of inferiority by point- Available in hardcover and e-book • Wherever books are sold. ing to the luminaries of the Abbasid period (750–1258), Islam’s “golden ALGONQUIN BOOKS www.algonquin.com

REVIEWS 85 age,” who, through their preserva- ried new ideas: those of St. Augus- es once subjected to the scrutiny of tion of ancient Greek culture and tine, the “Roman-Algerian bishop,” reason.” At this point, the author’s their innovations in the arts and sci- or of Hypatia, the “Greco-Egyptian dispassionate account of the feud ences, had contributed to the emer- mathematician.” The guiding theme gives way to a motif I kept encoun- gence of modern Europe. Thus “the is the essential relationship between tering in all the books reviewed here: earliest Islamic texts . . . were yoked thought and language, less as a wistful speculation about what might to an idea, the Muslim world, that philosophical question than as a have been. would not have made sense in their historical phenomenon. Insofar as own time.” the book tells a story, it is of how In this light, one could theoretically Arabic—“a marginal language spo- imagine a scenario whereby Muslim

scholars ...... convened at regular inter- hen they heard about Kho- ken by a marginal people”—became vals, whether over decades or centuries, meini’s attempt to convert a medium for the rise of reason, a to review what still counts as valid and W lingua franca the Soviets to Islam, the “ of intellectual dis- what does not—what reason dictates clerics of Qom were apoplectic. “Your course” from the seventh century that one should retain, and what now Holiness,” they wrote, “you have not to the eighteenth. offers only historical interest. Such for- referred Mr. Gorbachev to the truth Nusseibeh’s sensitive, elliptical han- mal convocations might prevent the re- ligion from falling into the hands of in- of the Holy Koran.” He had relied, dling of dense metaphysical material dividuals or parties using it for selfish or unforgivably, on philosophy: “the echoes one of the book’s central bigoted ends. condemned heretic Avicenna, the points: that the philosophical tradi- Sunni pantheist and arch-mystic Ibn tion in Arabic grew out of a world in Ultimately, the doctrine of the eter- al-Arabi, the works of Sohravardi which poetry was the preeminent nal Koran prevailed, and the advo- who was executed by the Muslims means of expression. Avicenna, the cates of “createdness”—of reason— for his ideological deviations.” (The eleventh-century thinker who caused met brutal ends. ayatollah responded in kind: “This the Iranian clerics such consterna- From today’s perspective, this old father of yours has suffered more tion, “identified imagination as the looks like a defeat of liberal values. from stupid reactionary mullahs medium of reason”; the transcendence But Nusseibeh warns us against than anyone else.”) Yet these medi- it allows “is nothing if not an act of confusing reason and freedom. eval thinkers had once been the freedom.” In this account, Moham- From the start, “the champions of pride of Islam, and it was their liter- med’s message was “a call to break out reason in Islam only took a dim ary and scientific achievements that of confining beliefs and mental hab- view of values in conflict with their nineteenth-century intellectuals, in its,” and the Koran marks the first own”; the persecution of Bashar ibn their efforts to prove “the innately steps in the movement for freedom of Burd, an eighth-century poet, for progressive orientation of Muslims,” thought in Arabic. Exegetes gathered his unorthodox beliefs is a case in were so keen to rediscover. to discuss the meaning of complex point. As their movement came to The Story of Reason in Islam, by verses: perhaps the first university in the fore under the Abbasids, the ra- Sari Nusseibeh, is an account of the world was located in a mosque tionalists’ attitude hardened. (How their lives and legacy. Though the originally founded by a woman in the the cult of reason might turn to tyr- author is a professor of philosophy ninth century, in present-day Moroc- anny is a story familiar from the Eu- at Al-Quds University, in Jerusalem, co, for precisely this purpose. ropean Enlightenment.) Early advo- and the book is being published by “Traumatic intra-Muslim vio- cates of free thought demarcated “a an academic press, it was written lence” after Mohammed’s death, in space within which they could com- with the uninitiated in mind. A 632, and the repressive political or- fortably pursue their own inquiries. note of introduction acknowledges der that followed, led to a harden- It did not extend so far that others that “the average Western reader” ing of views. The suppression of dis- could think as they wished.” might be surprised by the title, with sent by authoritarian rulers gave rise The Abbasids clung to power for its juxtaposition of apparently in- to the doctrine that human beings more than five hundred years, and compatible concepts. There is even had no free will. But it also invited Baghdad became a haven for intellec- an apology for the multitude of Ara- skeptical minds to sift through the tuals and scientists. But Baghdad was bic names (“Unfortunately, this ob- holy texts to determine whether also home to the mihna, a ninth- stacle cannot be eliminated entire- such claims were justified. Through century inquisition in which the ad- ly”), a consideration rarely shown in skillful weaving of events and ideas, vocates of the created Koran became works involving En glish names, al- Nusseibeh shows how politics deter- the persecutors, and dissenters were though “al-Farabi,” unlike “Worces- mined the themes—justice, free severely punished. The history of Is- tershire,” is pronounced how you will, the legitimacy of resisting an lam is full of such patterns of alterna- think it is. unjust leader—that became central tion. Nusseibeh sees evidence of this This primer paints an evocative to early Islamic thought. cyclical movement in the struggles of picture of the landscape where Is- A major dispute concerned wheth- the past century, such as that be- lam arose, a desert world laced er the Koran was “eternal” or “creat- tween secular nationalism and Is- with arteries of trade along which ed.” If the latter was true, the “halo” lamism. A balance, he writes, “still poets, merchants, and monks car- surrounding the text “simply vanish- has not been struck.”

86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2017 hy not? For Omar Saif rorism to strike the Emirates. In one WGhobash, the reason may of his letters on the subject, he be that dominant interpre- points his fi nger at aggressive clerics, tations of Islam have traditionally left whose rising voices and simplistic little room for doubt, which he de- worldviews are a snare for susceptible fi nes as “the broad sensation of hu- young men and women. Against mility in the face of a world that is those tempted by suicide missions continually changing.” Ghobash ap- and the promise of heaven, he coun- parently began his new book, Letters ters that the more diffi cult sacrifi ce is to a Young Muslim, as a series of theo- to face complexity. This may be the retical refl ections, before reworking book’s most valuable lesson. In Let- them into themed notes addressed to ters to a Young Poet, from which his fi fteen-year-old son. It was an in- Ghobash borrows his title, Rilke spired move, turning what might counsels his correspondent to “be have been a disparate set of thoughts patient toward all that is unsolved and frustrations into a hopeful hand- in your heart and try to love the book for the future. The presence of questions themselves, like locked the young interlocutor (“Saif, these rooms.” Letters to a Young Muslim is are the questions of your genera- a book full of questions, approached tion”) also serves to focus its more with a great deal of patience and abstract propositions. This is a gen- love. If these letters don’t have all tle, cautious work, which addresses the keys, they point to the right thorny questions with a parent’s com- doors. Their uses are the uses of di- passion and a diplomat’s delicate tread. gression; they create space for won- (Ghobash is the Emirati ambassador dering. They complicate. to Moscow.) It is an ode to gray, the Ghobash’s soul-searching epistle “area of uncertainty and doubt,” a appears to contradict de Bellaigue, call to resist those who offer comfort- whose book gives the lie to those who ing convictions. demand that Islam examine “its place In the hands of a less subtle writ- and conscience in the modern world.” er, some of the messages here might His appeal to doubt also seems to dis- have seemed a little pious or cloy- regard Islam’s long tradition of ratio- ing. What they advise is unim- nal inquiry, which Nusseibeh is at peachable: curiosity, empathy, in- pains to set out. In calling for the reli- dependence of mind. They wear gion to reform itself, Ghobash may their wisdom so lightly, it is easy to give the impression of buying into il- miss the fact that they amount to a lusory notions of a “Muslim world” sort of manifesto, a manual on how that, as Aydin shows, do not stand up to navigate a religion at war with to historical scrutiny. Yet in the fi nal itself. One of the longer letters ar- analysis, such tensions are superfi cial. gues that it is not enough, in the “If you want to be true to your Mus- face of the latest terror attack, to lim heritage,” Ghobash writes to his say that Islam is a religion of peace. son, “then you need to explore its his- It is also imperative to lead by ex- tory properly.” It is worth remember- ample and to take responsibility for ing that these books are written for New York Revisited the Islam of peace: different audiences: Ghobash is alone among the four in addressing his plea BY HENRY JAMES If we do not like what the extremists primarily to Muslim readers. His are doing, then we need to call them point is not that a reformation has yet First published in Harper’s Monthly out on it. It is too easy to say that they to take place, but that it has been ob- Magazine in 1906 have nothing to do with us. They scured and must be rediscovered. In speak in Allah’s name. And they do this sense, all four writers are partici- so convincingly. Even if their reading With an introduction by seems warped and out-of-date, it is a pating in a common project: to pres- Lewis H. Lapham reading . . . that has traction, that has ent a more varied and nuanced re- popularity. We must react in some cord, one in which the so-called poles FRANKLIN SQUARE way. We must take action. of Islam and the West are often deep- PRESS ly connected, and in which the wider Violence has been central to the gulf divides those who would tell this life of the author, who lost his father messy truth from those who would at the age of six in the fi rst act of ter- hide it. ■ Order online at store.harpers.org

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