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

by Paul A. Marshall (Contributor), 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 rapid growth of a starkly repressive version of Islamic shari'a law, often fueled by funds and support from Saudi Arabia. The central purpose of Islamists, including terrorists, is to impose such law in all Muslim lands, and then throughout the world in a new Caliphate . Despite its importance, this worldwide growth of extreme shari'a is under-documented and little understood. By a comparative study over the last twenty-five years of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this book shows its terrible effects on human rights, especially the status of women and religious freedom, of Muslims as well as religious minorities, and on democracy itself. It also shows that such laws are a direct threat to the American interest of advancing democracy and human rights, that the United States lacks a policy for dealing with the spread of extreme shari'a , and concludes with policy recommendations for the United States regarding specific countries confronting extreme shari'a .

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.