Understanding Islam

Amidst the current struggle to accurately apprehend and explain Islam, variousworks have appeared since the 9/11 tragedy. Into this array of publicationscomes Jerald Dirks, who offers his contribution as an attempt to presentan undistorted introduction to Sunni Islam based almost exclusively onthe Qur’an and the Sunnah and aimed primarily at the western Christianreader. Dirks is an American Christian convert to Islam who has written onsuch diverse topics as clinical psychology, Arabian horses, and, recently,inter-religious issues: The Cross and the Crescent: An Interfaith Dialoguebetween Christianity and Islam (amana publications: 2001) and Abraham:The Friend of God (amana publications: 2002).Divided into ten chapters, Understanding Islam attempts to outlineIslam’s beliefs, doctrines, and practices in a manner accessible to the averagenon-Muslim western reader. One could offer a broader outline, notingthat chapters 1 to 3 deal with the basic history of Islam unfolded throughprophetic history; chapters 4 to 6 cover the faith’s sources, doctrines, and rituals; and chapters 7 to 9 focus upon the singular issue of jihad, its meaningand applications as “war” within the teachings of Islam and in wider history.The final chapter acts as a simple summary and exhortation to learnmore through recommended Qur’an translations and other materials.The introduction discusses Islam’s two primary sources, the Qur’an andthe Sunnah, along with the overall purpose and preview of the book’s contents.This is followed, in chapter 2, by a systematic comparative summary ofsuch major pre-Islamic events as creation and God’s revelation through Hisprophets. Here, the author compares and contrasts Islamic, Christian, andJewish accounts, including such non-Biblical sources as the pseudepigraphaland the apocryphal writings. The third (and longest) chapter, coveringroughly a third of the book, introduces Prophet Muhammad, his life and callto prophecy through to the Makkan and the Madinan periods, and ends withhis death. Dirks tries to locate Muhammad’s coming within the Jewish andChristian scriptures and tries to focus on issues that a western reader mightbe biased against, such as the Prophet’s multiple marriages and the treatmentof Madinah’s Jewish tribes. He acknowledges more than once the inadequacyof covering Muhammad’s life in such a brief chapter, and thereforerefers interested readers to more complete biographical accounts ...