Muslim World And The West: Points Of Disconnect
Iymon Majid
THE HOUSE OF ISLAM: A GLOBAL HISTORY by Ed Husain Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, 324 pp., GBP25.00/R1644.00
September 2018, volume 42, No 9

At the heart of Ed Husain’s book The House of Islam: A Global History is his misplaced faith in the West and neo-conservatism. Husain writes ambitiously as a Muslim and evocatively as a westerner. This dual personality helps him to navigate through the tensions that Islam and the West supposedly have. Husain sees himself as an enlightened westerner-Muslim, but it is the West with which he feels comfortable despite his emphasizing the spiritual power of shrines and mosques throughout the book.

Husain offers a short history of Islam that starts with Prophet Muhammad and ends with how to make the Middle East a better place to live in the twenty-first century. In between, he writes for a targetted audience that he knows is not Muslim and who live in the West. He briefly mentions his journey from being an Islamist to a Sufi which helps him to make a larger argument in the book that he is an insider, that he knows all the sides of the story. In a sense, this makes The House of Islam a dangerous book: as an insider, the reader trusts him but the analysis he provides is both orientalist in tone and superficial in outlook. Husain neatly divides the book into four sections. The first section is more of a guide to understanding Islam and the chapters are titled, ‘What is Islam? and ‘What is the Sharia?’ The section attempts to offer a simple reading of the basic tenets of Islam and also provides an anthropological survey about the Muslims in the world today. The book shows how Muslims today are shaped by past debates on theology, culture, leadership and how they can emerge from their disagreements as a unitary community. Thus, Husain writes about the Sunni-Shia divide and argues that the schism between the two major sects of Islam still risk spreading and thereby creating a much more dangerous conflict.

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