The Basics

If someone told me they didn’t know much about Islam and wanted to read just one book about it, I would recommend Sumbul Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing (2008). Ali-Karamali writes in an easy, accessible, and often witty style about a huge range of topics, providing a comprehensive survey that somehow manages not to be overwhelming. She opens with a chapter on everyday Islam – the diverse ways Muslims practice their religion and live their lives. The next several chapters offer a basic introduction to Islam, including the core concepts, how Islam fits into the Judeo-Christian tradition, Muhammad, the Qur’an, “Who’s Who in Islam” (what’s an ayatollah?), and religious authority. She then goes on to address, with a personal yet informed voice, a wide range of controversial issues – women in Islam, jihad and fundamentalism, theft and adultery and punishment, September 11th, and why misconceptions persist. Ali-Karamali grew up in California and presents herself as a Muslim mom with small children at home, and her writing is livened with many homey anecdotes, but she also has an L.L.M. in Islamic Law and her knowledge of Islam goes deep. Highly recommended.

Carl W. Ernst’s Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (2003) is more challenging but also quite useful. Carl Ernst is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a specialist in Sufism. Both Protestant assumptions about the nature of religion and anti-Islamic prejudices, he argues, have for centuries profoundly distorted Westerners’ understandings of Islam and of Muslim people. He therefore starts by examining how Westerners have looked at Islam, in an attempt to get readers to see their own conscious and unconscious assumptions and prejudices. He explains what it means to use a religious studies approach to the study of a religion, and then takes a thematic approach to exploring the core meanings and the diversity of Islam, focusing in turn on religious language and experience, demographics, sacred sources, ethics, government, gender, spirituality, and art, including explaining how Sufism fits into the larger picture of Islam. Sometimes angry, often thought-provoking, Ernst celebrates the diversity and pluralism of Muslim traditions.

You may also be interested in the text of my talk on A Very Brief History of Islam.