Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam

Rating:
Summary: Interesting & engaging tour of the Middle East
Review: A.Shadid has been covering the M.E for many years and this books sums up a many persons he met during these years. His in depth knowledge of that region, its people, their culture, traditions and believes is unvaluable. I hope to read more of his work soon.

Rating:
Summary: A Hopeful Look at Political Islam
Review: Anthony Shadid, though not a native of the Middle East, comes off sounding like one. From his vantage position of a Boston Globe Middle East reporter and Lebanese lineage, he has spent significant time in the Middle East and seems to have an insider's eye in analyzing the torrid political landscape there.

I went on a spate of reading books on the Middle East and Islam after September 11th and this book is at the top of my list and comes highly recommended. In comparison to V.S. Naipul's "Beyond Belief," I would point you to Shadid's book for a good in depth analysis of Islam's current and powerful effect on the Middle East. Naipul's book is good for telling a story of people's lives in non-Arabic Islamic countries, but Shadid's work is what I was looking for...a well-written and engaging breakdown of a variety of Middle East countries and how Islam shapes the politics and daily underpinnings of those places.

Shadid's purview is definitely broad but doesn't loose out in the details of each country and movement. "Legacy of the Prophet," primarily covers Sudan's failed Islamic government, Iran's petered out revolution and Khatami's reform, Egypt's emerging democratic Islamic movements, with several stops in between in Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan to name a few.

Shadid's overly optimistic thesis is that Islamic extremism is taking in it's last dying desperate breaths and emerging from it, or as a more widespread alternative, a form of democratic political Islam that seeks to inculcate change from within existing governments. Though optimistic, Shadid at least has taken the time to expose the broader good of political Islam to a West that largely seeks out confirmation of presupposed suppositions of a political Islam that is violent, close-minded, and bent on death and destruction of all things Western. It seems a case of a narrow-minded and hopeless small minority of Islamic extremists that continue to represent to the West what is accepted (but uninformed) as the face of Political Islam. Shadid points out that this may not be the case and does it in a way that will keep you interested from beginning to end.

I'm surprised more people aren't reading and reviewing this highly engaging work.

Rating:
Summary: A Hopeful Look at Political Islam
Review: Anthony Shadid, though not a native of the Middle East, comes off sounding like one. From his vantage position of a Boston Globe Middle East reporter and Lebanese lineage, he has spent significant time in the Middle East and seems to have an insider's eye in analyzing the torrid political landscape there.

I went on a spate of reading books on the Middle East and Islam after September 11th and this book is at the top of my list and comes highly recommended. In comparison to V.S. Naipul's "Beyond Belief," I would point you to Shadid's book for a good in depth analysis of Islam's current and powerful effect on the Middle East. Naipul's book is good for telling a story of people's lives in non-Arabic Islamic countries, but Shadid's work is what I was looking for...a well-written and engaging breakdown of a variety of Middle East countries and how Islam shapes the politics and daily underpinnings of those places.

Shadid's purview is definitely broad but doesn't loose out in the details of each country and movement. "Legacy of the Prophet," primarily covers Sudan's failed Islamic government, Iran's petered out revolution and Khatami's reform, Egypt's emerging democratic Islamic movements, with several stops in between in Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan to name a few.

Shadid's overly optimistic thesis is that Islamic extremism is taking in it's last dying desperate breaths and emerging from it, or as a more widespread alternative, a form of democratic political Islam that seeks to inculcate change from within existing governments. Though optimistic, Shadid at least has taken the time to expose the broader good of political Islam to a West that largely seeks out confirmation of presupposed suppositions of a political Islam that is violent, close-minded, and bent on death and destruction of all things Western. It seems a case of a narrow-minded and hopeless small minority of Islamic extremists that continue to represent to the West what is accepted (but uninformed) as the face of Political Islam. Shadid points out that this may not be the case and does it in a way that will keep you interested from beginning to end.

I'm surprised more people aren't reading and reviewing this highly engaging work.

Rating:
Summary: A broad, authoritative history of Islamic politics today
Review: Legacy Of The Prophet: Despots, Democrats, And The New Politics Of Islam by journalist and Middle East expert Anthony Shadid offers the reader a broad, authoritative history of Islamic politics today. Drawing upon his many years of reporting in more than a dozen countries throughout the Muslim world, Shadid accurately chronicles how a new generation of Islamic militants are coming around to a more realistic and potentially more successful advocacy of their goals through democratic politics. Legacy Of The Prophet is strongly recommended for Islamic Studies, Middle East Studies, and International Political Studies supplemental reading lists and academic reference collections.

Rating:
Summary: September 11th renders some of 'Legacy' dated
Review: This optimistic view of Islamists published in January 2001 was rendered somewhat dated by events later that year. Even though Legacy of the Prophet continues to be a solid account of the moderation and rise of religious political movements in the Middle East, some of the more hopeful assertions would have been naive even if the World Trade Center remained intact. September 11th, of course, also changed some assumptions that would have been reasonable otherwise. All that aside, there remains considerable merit in many of the author's analyses of the region and its politics, and much of the book holds up. Legacy deserves three stars--but barely.

Author Anthony Shadid was an Associated Press correspondent based in Cairo. He understandably focuses much of the book on Egypt, and this provides Legacy with some great insight from the sources he cultivated there over the years. Unfortunately, the concentration on Cairo also minimizes those Islamic countries that probably are more important to the future of the relationship between the Muslim world and the West, notably Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Shadid does an excellent job in explaining the contest between Islamist groups and the repressive regimes that govern them. The social welfare system provided by Hamas, for example, stands in stark contrast with the corrupt government led by the Palestinian Authority. Hezbollah provides for the impoverished Shia while the Beirut government stuggles to bring the nation back from the ashes of civil war.

The darker aspects of these and other groups, though, aren't really explored. One particularly galling aspect of the book is Shadid's near-apologies for the persececution of Christians and other religious minorities in the region. This is particularly strange given that Shadid comes from a Christian Lebanese background. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would try to minimize the persecution of Egypt's large Coptic minority, but that sometimes seems to be the case here.

The author does take a long, hard look at the failed Islamic experiments in the Sudan and in Iran, and attempts to differentiate between those governments and those where religious and secular parties compete. What Shadid fails to do is explain exactly why an Islamist Egypt or Turkey wouldn't, in the end, resemble the Sudan. Shadid's thesis is that once in power, the Center Party in Egypt, as one example, would synthesize the Islamic concept of the umma with Western-style pluralism and tolerance. The record indicates otherwise.

So the question that always lingers, but is never answered, is how a state based on religion can truly embrace democracy and pluralism. Shadid thinks it can, but history---events that predate Osama bin Laden and even Mohammed by millinnea---indicates otherwise.