A call for heresy
why dissent is vital to Islam and America
- ISBN: 9780816651276
- Editorial: University of Minnesota
- Fecha de la edición: 2008
- Lugar de la edición: Minneapolis. Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 23 cm
- Nº Pág.: 281
- Idiomas: Inglés
In A Call for Heresy, Anouar Majid provocatively argues that the United States and contemporary Islam share far more than partisans on either side admit, and this "clash of civilizations" is in reality a clash of competing fundamentalisms. Illustrating this point, he draws surprising parallels between the histories and cultures of Islam and the United States and their shortsighted suppression of heresy (zandaqa, in Arabic), from Muslim poets and philosophers like Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) to the freethinker Thomas Paine, and from Abu Bakr Razi and Al-Farabi to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. He finds bitter irony in the fact that Islamic culture is now at war with a nation whose ideals are losing ground to the same reactionary forces that have long condemned Islam to stagnation.
