People of the Book - The Forgotten History of Islam and the West

People of the Book - The Forgotten History of Islam and the West

by Zachary Karabell

John Murray, HK$165

According to Arabist scholar Zachary Karabell, educated at Colombia and Oxford and with a PhD from Harvard, Lawrence Durrell was an American who lived in Alexandria in about 1900. Huh? The India-born British author of The Alexandria Quartet didn't enter the world until 1921. So plentiful are the mistakes, albeit relatively minor, in People of the Book that Allan Massie, reviewing for The Daily Telegraph, 'found myself hesitating to trust the author in areas where I was ignorant'. Damning stuff. Nevertheless, this is an informative, well-written examination of Islam in the context of its relationship with Christianity and Judaism, the three great monotheistic religions descended from Abraham. History shows Christianity to be the quarrelsome member of the family, picking fights depending on the political mood of the west.

The big shift comes in the 19th century, when Europe, having retooled its thinking with the Enlightenment by separating science from religion, embraces modernity. Islam fails to make the break and retreats from economic and political realities, with fundamentalism a consequence of that failure. Good argument undermined by sloppy editing.