Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law

by Paul A. Marshall (Editor), Jack Novick, R. James Woolsey (Foreword by)

A major feature of the rise of Islamism in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and parts of the West is the current rapid growth of a starkly repressive version of shari'a, Islamic law. In this book, noted human rights activists and scholars trace the growth of such law in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia; document its threat to the status of women, religious freedom, and democracy itself; and suggest how the rest of the world should respond. Published in cooperation with Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Paul Marshall is senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, Freedom House. He has lectured worldwide and is general editor of Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution. He is the author and editor of 15 other books on religion and politics, including the best-selling and award-winning Their Blood Cries Out, and Islam at the Crossroads and God and the Constitution, both published in 2002. Dr. Marshall has published many scholarly and popular articles and his writings have been translated into Russian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Malay, Korean, Arabic, and Chinese. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 1 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1400187.html

A collection of analytical essays about, as the book's subtitle puts it, "the worldwide spread of extreme shari'a law", sent me by one of the contributors shortly after its publication in 2005. The eight chapters cover Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia and Afghanistan. They vary in quality (the Nigerian chapter, by the book's editor, being remarkably poor) and also in approach; and I missed any real synthesis, which might have looked at Bangladesh, Egypt, Algeria, etc, and might also have looked at the comparative strengths of more liberal strands within contemporary Islamic thinking. I suppose such a synthesis would also have had to point out what still cannot be pointed out to the Washington funders (the book was published by Freedom House and has a foreword by James Woolsey), that the war in Iraq probably exacerbated the threat from radical Islamists.