(Dialogo sull’Islam tra un padre
e un figlio, Fazi, Rome, 2014; 400 pages). Introduction by Franco Cardini.
Available only in Italian. Buy it (15 €)
This is a book with many faces. It’s
a new, in-depth, reflection on Islamic religion and its impact on history and
modern world. First of all it emerges that there obtains a very big difference
between the diverse kinds of Islam: that of the Quran, that of Prophet
Muhammad, and so on the Islam of the great Caliphs, of Sufism, of modern
intellectuals, of fundamentalist or terroristic movements. All these are Islam,
yet they are so dissimilar that they hardly may be considered one and the same religion.
We discover in this book surprising facts: that stoning, for example, doesn’t
exist at all in the Quran, or that today’s Islam’s ethics – quite puritan – is
in contrast with the teaching and the behaviour of Muhammad. While it deeply
analyses and proposes in a thoroughly new and sometimes baffling light the most
burning aspects of Islam, this book in the same time spells out clearly the
main Islamic beliefs, religious practices and moral principles. In addition to
this a detailed outline has been given of the origin of the Quranic text, of
the hadiths (the Sunna) and of the elaboration of the shari’a, the religious
law.
But
the feature for which this book most distinguishes itself is its dialogical
formulation: the two authors, father and son, both experts of the matter but
with rather divergent perspectives – religious, scholar, linguist the first,
agnostic, anthropologist and traveller the second -, create a living book in
which the different opinions confront each other and modify. This implies also
that the authors sweep outside Islam, to question themselves about the actual
meaning of belonging to any religion, about the role of beliefs today,
especially within Christianity, as well as about globalization that is changing
radically the traditional ways of life on the earth. Each one of the authors
reads these phenomena from divergent perspectives, but both do so with great
acumen, knowledge and a human and spiritual depth that will not leave the
reader cold.
INDEX
Preface
I. Religious intolerance in
Christianity and Islam
II. Quran, Sunna, Shari’a
III. Religion and politics. Divine
law and lay state.
IV. Women and family in Islam
V. Puritan Islam and the issue of
the veil
VI. Polygamy and eroticism
VII. Muslims’ integration in the
West and the role of the school
VIII. Judaism in the Islamic view. Jews,
Muslims and the Palestinian problem
IX. Jesus in Islam and the
relationship between Muslims and Christians
X. Colonialism, Jihad, terrorism
XI. Prayer in Islam and the deep
meaning of the yearning for God
XII. Islamic ethics of poverty and
the triumph of petrodollars
EPILOGUE: Patterns and alternatives
for the future
