Aspects of Islam

by Ronald Geaves

On a Monday in August 2004, three Muslim girls sat with each other on the floor of a mosque surrounded by boxes of books. Two wore traditional Muslim dress, their companion was dressed Western style, but their intention was the same. They were involved in a project to distribute almost 2 million dollars worth of books, DVDs, and videos to over 300 British public libraries. Their aim was not to convert or proselytize but to educate the public about their faith and try to offset the negative image of Islam that has developed since 9/11. Perhaps of more significance was the fact that the books used for the project were not the 'insider' literature produced by the mosques, but works of Western academics that approached their subject in a neutral and informative manner.

Ron Geaves offers a thematic and experiential exploration of the Muslim religion and world that shows it is not some homogenous entity but the dynamic faith you would expect to find in a religion over fourteen centuries old, consisting of over a billion people stretching from the USA to China.

Readers of the book require no previous knowledge of the subject. Chapters are dedicated to individual topics and range from a look at Western media representation of Islam, through controversial issues such as martyrdom, shari'a law, jihad , and the place of women. It examines the ideas of community, Sufism, fundamentalism and other sects within the faith, and also explains the source of many of the interpretations of the Prophet Mohammed, and the importance of the Muslim concept of unity.

By examining the divisions that exist within contemporary Islam, Geaves makes a special contribution to the ongoing examination of today's Muslim communities. By offering a way to better understand this tradition, Geaves helps to counteract the oversimplifications that seem to dominate popular discourse about Muslims and instead shows them as participants in a religious tradition that is still unfolding, struggling to recognize and respect its diversities while seeking to maintain a unity that all parts of it acknowledge as central.

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 2005

About the author

Ron Geaves is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University. He held a Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Chester (2001-2007) and a Chair in the Comparative Study of Religion at Liverpool Hope University (2007-2013). He joined the Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds in 1988 where he began to work on the transmigration of South Asian religions to Britain, especially Islam. He completed his PhD thesis ‘Sectarian Influences within Islam in Britain’ which was published as a Community Religions Monograph. He has researched Islam in Britain since that time, publishing several books that explore British manifestations of Sufism.

He was Chair of the Muslims in Britain Research Network (2007-2010) and instrumental in the creation of BRAIS (British Association of Islamic Studies), remains a lifetime member of the committee. He has also been Secretary of AUDTRS, the scholarly body representing all departments of religion in the UK. His work remains focused on the application of religious knowledge to real life affairs and he is a passionate believer in advocacy. As a consequence he has involved in a number of projects bridging academia to government, law, architects and media.

Reviews

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq on the one hand, and the abomination that was ISIS on the other, Aspects of Islam is a helpful discussion of many of the key aspects of the Islamic faith that are frequently misunderstood by Western Media. These include jihad, "fundamentalism" (a term that Geaves takes issue with) and the place of women in the religion. It is more than a primer - some knowledge of Islam is probably helpful when reading it - but not a specialist work.

Geaves has a clear purpose to writing the book. He has spent much of his life writing about Islam and engaging with Muslims. He is frustrated at the failure of Western commentators to understand the basics of the world's second largest religion (actually Western commentators fail to understand any religion) and therefore writes what in other circumstances might be called an apologia.

Geaves makes this aim clear in his introduction, so it would have been wrong to expect a too critical approach to his subject. Even so, occasionally it felt as though some of the issues were brushed under the carpet. To say that Muslims are largely aware of sub-saharan Christianity seems a little strange. Presumably the sub-Saharan Muslims are not unaware, and certainly not those responsible for the killing of 300 Nigerian Christians reported on the day that I began this book.

Likewise the clear definition of what made for a righteous jihad (no killing of the innocent, no killing of women and children, no killing of the people of the book) is helpful in reminding us that holy war does not necessitate indiscriminate murder, but recent evidence seems to indicate that it normally does (and, let's be clear, not just when Muslims wage it, either).

The extent to which Asian culture and Muslim theology converge and collide was mentioned but not adequately explored. Honour killings, FGM and barbaric punishments may not be integral to the Islamic faith (the first two are absolutely not) but it's difficult to escape the conclusion that religion is at least used as a prop to these phenomena.

So a book that was helpfully informative and a necessary corrective to the "essentialism" of the Western Media that sees all Muslims as potential terrorists and anti-intellectual misogynists, but one that still left me with a lot of "but what about"s in my mind.

[Brody]

Sociology of religion, again. one thing i'll say for this instructor, he's incredibly well read, and has an incredible memory for pulling information and books out of his head.