The Trouble with Islam Today - Irshad Manji

A powerful book.  I'm surprised she hasn't been assassinated yet.  A well-reasoned and well-sourced critic of mainstream, and fundamentalist, Islam's controversial positions on human rights, women, other religions, and the role of reason.  It brings up issues of contradictions in the Koran, of historical and social influence on the text, of literalism vs. interpretations.  She also looks at the idea of who controls the interpreting and how that will influence the message.
A good read for anyone who would like to engage in discussion of these issues, whatever religion's position you may want to look at.  Manji pillories the west's tolerance of repressive religious practices on the basis of multiculturalism or cultural sensitivity.
She also discusses the arab warrior tribal culture element in Islam and how it has impoverished several ancient cultural and pluralistic muslim civilizations, from Iran to Baghdad to Spain to Indonesia.
There is also an interesting section on her visit to Israel where she points out that the Israeli/Palestinian relations are not quite as black and white as you could sometimes think.  This in the context of countering the demonization of Israel and Jews in mainstream Islam.  She also makes the point that the leading middle eastern countries have exported their view of the Palestinian issue as part of the religion/culture context  ex. to Indonesia, where they have other social and cultural issues much closer to home.  It would be interesting to look at her position in detail.

Much of her critique of Islam is equally applicable to any other doctrinaire or fundamentalist ideology, whether religious, political, social or economic.


Some quotes:

discussing V. S. Naipaul - (he) "was soon to discover that no colonization has been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith..."

"Why, over the past one thousand years, has the entire Arab world translated only as many books as Spain translates every year?  Is it be because the more people know about foreign notions, the more likely they'll be to examine their own?"

- from  Amin Malouf "Traditions deserve to be respected only in so far as they are respectable - that is, exactly in so far as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women."