| RECONCILIATION Islam, Democracy, and the West Benazir Bhutto New York: Harper, 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-10 0-06-156758-2 | 320pp. | HC | $27.95 | |
| Page 25: | "Yet Jihad is not one of the Five Pillars of Islam (except in Khariji theory) ..." |
| What is Khariji theory? The book does not explain. |
| Page 30: | "These scholars can evaluate the historical context at the time the Quran was received and interpolate universal principles that can be applied to contemporary issues." |
| It's probably arguable, but I would say this S/B "extrapolate". |
| Page 30: | "The message of Islam is subject to itjihad and ijma." |
| The Arabic word itjihad has previously been defined. But ijma ("consensus") is not defined until page 71. |
| Page 86: | This page categorizes Muslim nations as free, partly free, or not free, based on the 2007 rankings by Freedom House. Unfortunately, Jordan is listed as both partly free and not free; it is the former. And Algeria (not free) is totally missing from the list. |
| In my table (See "Islam and its Discontents"), I've corrected these mistakes. The next page raises the question of how the "predominantly Muslim" nations (of which there are 45) differ from those that are "majority-Muslim" (47 in number.) And on page 299 she writes of "the fifty-seven member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference." I don't know how to resolve these discrepancies. |
| Page 106: | "The current Egyptian leader, Hosni Mubarak, took power in 1981, following the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat." |
| Six pages are devoted to Egypt. This is the only mention of Anwar Sadat. It's hard to understand why such an important figure in Egypt's history was ignored. |
| Page 109: | "The Western record in Iraq may have led both directly and indirectly to the current state of affairs." |
| Usage: S/B "either directly or indirectly". Saying "both" is overkill. (And "may have" indicates excessive uncertainty about her conclusion.) |
| Page 115: | "Local Afghan warlords who had fought one another bitterly surrendered to the Taliban without a bullet being fired." |
| The book does not explain this bloodless victory by the Taliban. |
| Page 117: | "Moderates had been purged by the dictatorship, fearing their sympathies for the executed reformist and the democratically elected prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto." |
| Grammar: S/B either "who feared their sympathies" or "in fear of their sympathies". (Other alternatives exist as well.) |
| Page 131: | "And, as the comparative democratic scholar Carl Gershman has noted, attempts at inclusion may very well prove to be pragmatic and prescient." |
| Vocabulary: S/B either "perceptive," "percipient," or "perspicacious". (Other alternatives exist as well.) |
| Page 140: | "Continuing our democratic tour de raison, we turn to the Middle East, where a few states register as "partially free" on the Freedom House scale." |
| Mrs. Bhutto uses a very restricted version of the term "Middle East": it apparently encompasses only a few small countries including Kuwait and Oman. Brunei is specifically excluded from the book's "Middle East." She might have meant to exclude the countries normally thought of as being part of the Middle East — countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey — because she had already covered them individually. But, if so, saying that would have taken only a few extra words. |
| Page 147: | "A turning point came in 1973, when the popular political figure Juan Perón returned from exile. . . The ensuing resignation of then-president Héctor José Cámpora allowed Perón to run in and win democratic elections of 1973 with 61 percent of the vote. Tragically, however, he soon died of a heart attack and his vice president and second wife, Maria Estela Isabel Martínez de Perón, was unable to keep the country together..." |
| It's no mystery that Juan Perón's second wife was unable to keep the country together; she died in 1952. Mrs. Bhutto's understandable error was to confuse his second wife, the well-known Eva Perón (or Evita) with his third wife, who was president of Argentina from 1974 to 1976. She was María Estela Martínez Cartas de Perón (born 4 February 1931), better known as Isabel Martínez de Perón or Isabel Perón. |
| Page 154: | "As Václav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, said so presciently in 1992, 'Communism was not defeated by military force, but by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of man to manipulation.' " |
| Vocabulary: S/B either "perceptively," "percipiently," or "perspicaciously". (Other alternatives exist as well.) |
| Page 160: | "The beautiful empress Noor Jehan was said to have ruled the Mughal Empire during the reign of the emperor Jehangir." |
| This seems a contradiction, but it is merely poorly stated. As suggested by the previous sentence, what it seems to mean is that Noor Jehan was the effective ruler behind the nominal emperor, her husband Shah Jehan, after her father Jehangir (and perhaps during, since Jehangir died on the throne.) |
| Page 172: | "Moreover, as prime minister of Junagadh state, my grandfather had also been instrumental in advising that the Muslim ruler accede to Pakistan." |
| What's puzzling about this is that Mrs. Bhutto protested earlier that Hindu-majority states (which Junagadh was) should have gone to India, Muslim-majority states to Pakistan. If there were other considerations in the case of Junagadh, she should have named them. |
| Page 195: | "...the nine-year battle in Afghanistan had depleted the Soviet Union of the ability to survive as an unified state and of the resources it needed..." |
| Grammar: S/B "as a unified state". |
| Page 196: | "In 1988, the electoral deck was stacked against the PPP. The state-controlled media were clearly hostile to the forces of democracy. At the time the literacy level in Pakistan was 26 percent, and political parties were recognized by their symbols. Our party symbol was snatched from us and we had to find a new one." |
| Mrs. Bhutto does not explain how this "snatch" was accomplished. |
| Page 211: | "Strong sanctions followed suit, isolating Pakistan..." |
| Extra word: S/B "followed". |
| Page 244: | " ...'A central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.' " |
| Usage: S/B Islamic and Confucian. The hyphenated term confusingly implies the several states are a blend of the doctrines of Mohammed and Confucius. "It's a ball of Confucian; that's what the word is today." |
| Page 246: | "Maulana Maudoodi, the founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami Maudoodi states.' " |
| He named his movement after himself? |
| Page 283: | "Their views cannot be rejected out of hand by other ulema as a deviation from the Islamic path." |
| This Arabic word, as far as I know, is not defined in the book. |
| Page 315: | "And their challenging of the status quo will echo the words of George Bernard Shaw that my friend Kathleen Kennedy's father, the late Robert F. Kennedy, so powerfully quoted across America in 1968: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . . I dream of things that never were and ask 'why not?' "" |
| Oh, lord! Did she not know that, in Shaw's play, those words come from the Devil? |
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