Tariq Ramadan

First of all you should know I’m an Irish Catholic so I was very grateful for the opportunity to read this to learn more about Islam from a pre-eminent source.

I was raised by a father who was insistent we learn and respect other faiths because our own family had suffered severe losses for the crime of being Catholic in Ireland. He taught us about the Tanakh, Quran, and other sacred scriptures to find balance with the Catholic Bible used in our own culture.

In the States I often see and show more hear about those in the Muslim faith being treated very similarly to the way my own family was and do not want to be counted among the ignorant. I feel those who are of a similar mind in wanting to enrich their understanding would do well to pick this up.

This text was written so that you could have absolutely no familiarity or a media educated familiarity to Islam and be able to easily grasp the tenets of the faith. There is no reason a person who thoroughly reads this work and takes time to understand what the author is teaching can walk away still feigning ignorance of this beautiful faith.

His writing style is so easy to follow that this is less like those boring texts you feel forced to read for class and more like a journey to something deeper and more meaningful. You can’t help but get caught up in the passion whispering through his words and become enthralled with the truth of what Muslims seek.

Even a Non-Muslim, such as myself, can appreciate and enjoy what is being taught on these pages. I ended feeling like not only had I learned about something far greater than myself but felt like I finally understood why my father pushed us to explore beyond the mass and rosaries we use in our culture. I have come away with believing not only is it possible to believe in different things but to understand and accept another’s position without feeling like my own is threatened.

I hope others take the time to study this book and find a mesmerizing experience as well. show less

This was our second book for the Ill Fated Muslim Book Club.

This is a scholarly approach to Muslims living in Europe and the challenges they face in living as a religious minority. Challenges include coping with the majority population as well as dealing with extremist "live in the Muslim ghetto" mentality conservative Muslims.

Tariq Ramadan is the current point man for the Muslim intelligensia in Europe, and he gained a great deal of fame when Bush et al refused to give him an entry VISA show more into the USA. Obama and company have let him come through the USA, and he has been making a lot of book tours since.

Word of our book club had spread, and we now had slated to join some very high flying local celebrities. We were excited. However, celebrity life is very busy, and the said celebrities really don't have time to read. Sometimes they get their wives to read, but wives get busy with small chidren. We actually had one celebrity READING THE BOOK DURING DINNER, who in the end sniffed, "American Muslims are far ahead of the Europeans. I have heard all this stuff before.".

Unfortunately, this was the attitude of most of the American Muslims, "We are ahead of the European Muslims politically. They ought to be learning from us, we have nothing to learn from them. They are backward." That is the sound of my teeth grinding.

In retrospect, we ought to have chosen Ramadan's "What I Believe" because it is shorter and more to the point. Excellent for Muslim attention spans.

Then three months later, Tariq Ramadan started his USA book tour, and everyone was touting how "brilliant' he was. Grr..

The best advice Tariq Ramadan gave American Muslims? "Read more. Sit down and read a book."

How can you not love this man? show less

Considering what a well-intended and lucid philosophizing attempt it generally came out to be, I hate to say that it unfortunately falls a little short of its intended end. It certainly is a 'quest' for meaning; however, in general, Ramadan fails to provide a really original philosophy of pluralism. It seems like a self-evident myriad of compromises that comes as a necessary burden with any such attempt. It is certainly good as a reasonable survey of all the interesting questions belonging show more to ontological, epistemological and existential enquiries, however, except for an uninitiated reader, it falls short in covering that comparatively limited ground as well.

Ultimately, one wonders what original thread can really come out from an intricately complex, though haphazard crisscrossing of a kind of quasi philosophia perennis, extremely cautious and delimited random bits of scriptural reasoning and chaotic attempts to develop a dialogue somewhere on the lines of David Bohm and the early theosophical Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Considering Ramadan's expertise in Islamic studies and jurisprudence, it had been a wonderful project had he attempted a cogent, elaborate and definitive philosophy of Islamic pluralism on the verge of sociology of religion and existential experience of modernity. There are already such attempts by the likes of Farid Esack with far less ambiguities as compared to this one by Ramadan.

I would say that Ramadan's canvas was rightly ambitious to encompass all the grand questions; however, in order to reach a broader audience he misdirected the text towards a downhill pop slant. Hence, this overall essentially chaotic attempt with a (rightful) nonlinear characterization claiming to be (unrealistically) linear as far as the intended aim of 'developing' a philosophy of pluralism is concerned. show less

The current developments in the Middle East develop at such a rapid pace that The Arab awakening, first published in 2012 was already outdated by 2015. For instance, the book does not at all discuss the rise of ISIS, which would cast a very black cloud over the relatively optimistic outlook of the book.

The Arab awakening seems to be a book that was thrown together in a hurry. The book 's length is no more than 162 pages, followed by 26 appendices covering another circa 100 pages. These 26 show more appendices consist of a compilation of mostly short blog postings and news paper articles and columns.

The Arab awakening seems to be a book for the specialist reader rather than the general reading public. It gives a good idea of the function of the Internet in the spread and development of the liberatory movement, known as the Arab Spring. show less