Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58940 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 230 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781595620170
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From the Publisher
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, U.S. public officials seemed to have no idea whether or not many Muslims supported the bombings. This troubled Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton, who felt that "no one in Washington had any idea what 1.3 billion Muslims were thinking, and yet we were working on intricate strategies that were going to change the world for all time." Clifton commissioned his company to undertake the enormous job.

The result is Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, based on six years of research and more than 50,000 interviews representing 1.3 billion Muslims who reside in more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have sizable Muslim populations. Representing more than 90% of the world's Muslim community, it makes this poll the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind.

What the data reveal and the authors illuminate may surprise you:

* Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustifiable.
* Large majorities of Muslims would guarantee free speech if it were up to them to write a new constitution AND they say religious leaders should have no direct role in drafting that constitution.
* Muslims around the world say that what they LEAST admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values -- the same answers that Americans themselves give when asked this question.
* When asked about their dreams for the future, Muslims say they want better jobs and security, not conflict and violence.
* Muslims say the most important thing Westerners can do to improve relations with their societies is to change their negative views toward Muslims and respect Islam.

The research suggests that conflict between Muslims and the West is NOT inevitable and, in fact, is more about policy than principles. "However," caution Esposito and Mogahed, "until and unless decision makers listen directly to the people and gain an accurate understanding of this conflict, extremists on all sides will continue to gain ground."

Who Speaks for Islam? is an important book that challenges conventional wisdom and sheds greater light on what motivates Muslims worldwide. It is a must-read for anyone committed to creating peace and security in our lifetime.

From the Back Cover
"In these fraught days of heightened tension and increasing hostility, few books could be more timely."
--Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner

"As our world spirals out of control with greater violence and misunderstanding between the West and the Muslim world, Who Speaks for Islam? cuts through the conflicting rhetoric of politicians and pundits and presents the often-silenced voice of Muslims everywhere. I cannot imagine a more important or more badly needed intervention."
--Deepak Chopra, author of Peace is the Way

"The data presented in this book are not only arresting, but indispensable. Who Speaks for Islam? should be required reading for policy makers, journalists, broadcasters, teachers, students, and scholars."
--Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God

"At once incisive and provocative, this book is brimming with valuable insights into what Muslims think about religion, democracy, women's rights, extremism, and Muslims' relations with the West. This is a must-read for pundits and policy makers, specialists and non-specialists, American or Muslim."
--Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future

"Who Speaks for Islam? teaches us about one of the most important issues of our time. The book contains many surprises about how Westerners and Muslims view one another."
--Jessica Stern, author of Terror in the Name of God and Academic Director of the Program on Terrorism and the Law at Harvard Law School

"This is an important book. Years after 9/11, politics and quick judgments continue to stand in the way of a clear-eyed view of the Muslim world. Not so for Esposito and Mogahed. They provide powerful evidence and compelling logic that shows Muslims around the world have many of the same hopes and dreams, and face many of the same issues and concerns, as other people do."
--Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago

"Who Speaks for Islam? could not be more timely. It provides essential insights into the thinking and attitudes of a large part of the global Muslim population on critical issues such as democracy, theocracy, extremism, jihad, women's rights, and the prospects of cooperation or conflict between the West and the Muslim world."
--Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; founding director, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University

About the Author
John L. Esposito, Ph.D., is a leading expert on the Muslim world. He is University Professor and a professor of religion and international affairs and of Islamic studies at Georgetown University and the founding director of Georgetown's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is also the past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies and a consultant to governments and multinational corporations. Esposito is editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and Oxford Islamic Studies Online. His more than 35 books include What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam. He currently resides in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Jeanette P. Esposito, Ph.D.

Dalia Mogahed is a senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. She leads the analysis of Gallup's unprecedented study of more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide. Mogahed also directs the Muslim-West Facts Initiative, through which Gallup, in collaboration with The Coexist Foundation, is disseminating the findings of the Gallup World Poll to key opinion leaders in the Muslim World and the West. She travels the globe engaging audiences on what Muslims around the world really think. Her analysis has appeared in a number of leading publications, including The Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, Harvard International Review, Middle East Policy, and many other academic and popular journals. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Mohamed, and two sons, Tariq and Jibreel.

Customer Reviews

Insightful and easy
A good book, which is especially useful to people unfamiliar with the Muslim world. I would highly recommend it to non-Muslims and Muslims alike.

Its positives are that it is especially revealing about Muslims societies and people, capturing their perspectives on a wide range of issues including feminism, terrorism and development; and then secondly in contrasting these perspectives with those of Europeans and Americans. The results are really quite surprising. The third good thing about this text is that it is highly read-able. At only 170 small-ish reading pages of large-ish font size, it takes about a half day to go through.

Its negatives are few. The one that struck me was that the book is based on reems of Gallup data - none of which is presented, even in the appendices. The reader is presented with isolated snippets of data, and I would have liked to see a more comprehensive and robust presentation of data from which to draw my own interpretations. Somebody might also raise the point that this is not really an academic or 'intellectual' book - but in fairness, I don't think either author intended for it to be so.

High time for a reality check
Everybody may have a right to his or her own opinion, but this doesn't mean that all opinions are equally right. What separates mere opinion from reasoned judgment, at least when it comes to empirical claims, is a hard and judicious analysis of available data. The more heated the topic under discussion, the more important it is to have facts that back up positions. Otherwise, those who are most passionate, but not necessarily most informed, can carry the day.

Since at least 9/11, American pundits and people in the street (and a President) have made lots of claims about Islam. Everyone who reads the papers or watches television can recite them by heart: Muslims hate Americans because of our freedoms. Muslims despise democracy. Muslims are out to colonize Europe. The more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he or she is to become a terrorist. Muslims want theocratic governments. There's an inevitable and insoluble culture clash between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. And on and on it goes.

The extraordinary value of Who Speaks for Islam? is that the authors, John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed appeal to hard data from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) to examine these and other common U.S. opinions about Muslims. For six years, GWP interviewed tens of thousands of Muslims in over 35 nations, collecting a sample that represented 90% of the world's Muslim population (1.3 billion). The results--the hard data--are not just surprising. They're shocking. They suggest that almost every single thing that Americans think we know about Islam and Muslims are distortions. As such, Who Speaks for Islam? is a bracing reality check that, if read by enough of us, can change minds and policies.

Let me just mention two sets of data that go counter to two popular opinions about Islam. One has to do with sharia and the other with freedom of speech (and civil liberties in general).

The U.S. perception is that Muslims want to establish legal systems based exclusively on harsh sharia, or religious laws. But in fact, polled Muslims indicate something different. In most countries, only a minority of respondants want Sharia as the only source of law. In only 5 countries--Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh--do respondants want Sharia as the only source of law. Most respondants think that an ideal legal system is based in part but not exclusively on Sharia. Ironically, a 2006 survey revealed that a full 46% of Americans think the Bible should a "a source," and 9% think it should be the "only" source, of legislation. 42% of Americans think religious leaders should be directly involved in writing laws, and 55% think the idea is awful--almost exactly the same figures about Muslim religious leaders and the law that come out of Iran (pp. 48-49).

Another common assumption is that Muslims dislike free speech, and the worldwide protests against the now infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammed are frequently cited as evidence. But vast numbers of polled Muslims insist that they admire many Western civil liberties. Their resentment against the U.S. isn't its freedoms so much as what they perceive as "the West's hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslims are inferior; and their fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation" (p. 141). So what drove the protests against the Danish cartoons for most Muslims wasn't a hatred of freedom of speech, but shock at what was perceived as disrespect of a religious figure venerated by Muslims. Interestingly, many non-Muslims agree that freedom of speech should be limited when it comes to ridiculing religious figures or using racist slurs. 57% of (non-Muslim) British and 45% of (non-Muslim) French thought the Danish cartoons shouldn't be protected by freedom of speech. Similarly, more than 75% of both populations would forbid cartoons making light of the Holocaust, and 86% of both would disallow racist cartoons (pp. 142-145). Once again, things just aren't as simple as the one-liner "Muslims are against freedom of speech" makes them out to be.

Are there genuine differences between Muslims and non-Muslims? Of course there are. But understanding wherein real differences as opposed to imaginary ones lie is the first step toward genuine dialogue. Who Speaks for Islam? paves the way for that initial step. Highly, urgently, recommended.

Muslim 101, Excellent Overview and Starting Point
This book nose-dived to a three and even a two as I was confronted with what appeared to be a Saudi-USA sponsored propaganda piece that did not properly consider India (largest Muslim population after Indonesia) and that addressed what Muslims thought without being explicit about US misbehavior, what I think of as Dick "Not the Virgin" Cheney's "immaculate conception" of the most amoral, costly, and destructive global war in our history. Bless him--had he not taken the Republic over a cliff and into insolvency, the two thirds of the voters who have tuned out the two party spoils system ("you pay, we'll make it legal to steal") would not be coming back into 2008 steaming mad and with both feet.

However, I persisted, and ultimately this book settled at a four. What I found was a series of offerings that allow this book to be a very fine "Muslim 101 Lite" for the general public. I totally admire the reviewer that has listed more in-depth works for consideration and have urged him to edit the review to use the Amazon feature that allows links to the pages for each of those books.

I also detect a real disconnect in that the book lists all Muslim countries up front, but the fine print says the survey only covered the 10 predominantly Muslim countries, and that list specifically excludes India, which has the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia, and in my mind that discredits the study by perhaps 20%.

Highlight provided early on by the authors:

+ Muslims do not see West as monolithic (and also see distinctions between Americans, America, US Government, US military, and the bellicose presence of US forces in their countries). I found this also in a Strategic Communication survey across the 27 countries in the US Central Command Area

+ Muslim majority, and especially women, want jobs, development, opportunity, not jihad and certainly not US occupation or corruption

+ Muslim silent majority rejects attacks on civilians (but I would say the book does not do as well as it could on showing that they also feel USA "deserved" 9-11--regardless of let it happen or made it happen allegations). Today the USS Cole belligerents got a free pass and we are reminded that it was Bill Clinton that took Madeline Albright's advice to ignore the attacks on Khobar Towers (Iran), two Embassies (al-Qaeda?) and the USS Cole (al-Qaeda?).

+ Religious moderates are in the majority, consider democracy a FOREIGN concept, and look to find ways to accommodate faith, family, and state without their being exclusive or compartmented. One could even say moderate Muslims are pre-disposed to be holistic!

+ The one thing the West could do to improve relations with Muslims is to show more respect and press for more understanding (in both directions).

+ Majority favor religious law as a source of legislation, but do not want clerics to have a direct role in drafting the constitution (I am reminded of how Israel went too far toward extremism when it yielded to its religious extremists--and of course Israel used the tactic of terrorism against the British to good effect, and ignored Gandhi's observation that "Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French.")

+ My valuation of this book takes a definite leap upwards as I appreciate three facts that come together:

- Within the limits of prostitution toward those who pay their bills, the Gallup book does a good job--but I have BLAND in one section--of raising hard truths that those in power have no interest in, but could be helpful to voters.

- Each section has little gray boxes worth a look.

- Each section ends with key points summarized.

+ The book ultimately loses one star because it does not cite many books for context and when it does, tends to go with the discredited Fukiyama and the discredited Blair. This is an undergraduate reading that needs several more layers of study, and hence I recommend the other books suggested by an earlier reviewer.

+ I am totally absorbed by the book's account of how the Pope, with the best of intentions and relying on his top "experts," made many mistakes in his speech attempting to reconcile with Islam, and was so told by over 100 Muslim scholars. This drives home both the limits of experts embedded with any leadership figure, and the importance of multicultural appreciative inquiry. The three candidates for President of the USA today are out of touch with citizens and out of touch with reality because they are giving stump speeches instead of leading nation-wide conversations on the ten high level threats to humanity outlined in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and the twelve policies that must be recovered from the special interests that hijacked them to steal from the many for the benefit of the few. See also The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back

+ The book does cite Professor Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism and adds primary research to the effect that the radicalized are not poor or illiterate, but rather educated and moderately well-off. This was my own finding in 1976 when I did my first Master's thesis on the prediction of revolution. The book astounds me in noting that while only 7% of the Muslim population is radicalized, this number is NINETY ONE MILLION. The book also documents the plain fact that the primary motivation for suicidal terrorism is almost invariably FOREIGN OCCUPATION.

+ Page 84 lists the Muslim perceptions surveyed has of the USA, we learn that they are:

- Ruthless (68%)

- Scientifically & technologically advanced (68%)

- Aggressive (66%)

- Conceited (65%)

- Morally decadent (64%)

The book does a very good job of addressing how the civil rights conflict is closer to the Muslim-Christian-Jewish conflict, calling this a clash of cultures (to which I would add, a clash of economic corruption and predatory looting versus commonwealth exploitation by, of, and for indigenous peoples) and specifically discounting the clash of civilizations as the model. Readers interested in the whole question of belief systems can find the Technical Preface by Robert Garigue free online or at Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time.

The book does well at portraying Muslims world-wide as feeling under siege from the USA, and concludes from its primary research that Muslim anger is based on US foreign policy and its effect on their own peace and development. This is not rocket science, but I assure you, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeline Albright, Condi Rice, even Strobe Talbott--they are NEVER going to come to grips with the fact that US foreign policy today is lunatic, out of control, costly, and totally out of touch with how to wage peace at one third of the cost of war. See for example Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025

The book ends on a note that suggests that both Muslims and Christians deeply want and need more erespect and understanding at a public diplomacy level, but the book is also quite specific in noting how US public diplomacy (and I would add, Strategic Communication) is completely out of touch with reality. You can no longer manufacture consent or use propaganda to mislead the majority of the world. As Joe Trippi points out, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything--Trippi is a genius, but I would note that we have moved one step beyond--cell phones, not the Internet, are the primary intellectual, emotional, cultural, and asymmetric warfare tool of choice today, one reason why the National Security Agency is freaking out--they cannot build a computer that weights next to nothing, runs on almost no energy, and can do petaflop calculations per second--the human brain (these are the last three words in Jim Bamford's book, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. US intelligence is "inside out and upside down" as I explained in Forbes ASAP, and desperately needs a draconian redirection of funding from the %60B we spend on the 4% we can steal, to rebalancing the use of all national powers and especially education, rule of law, and infrastructure here at home, and public diplomacy as well as open source or public intelligence that can exploit all information in all languages all the time.

I liked the details on the survey that are included in the appendix.

On balance, the book does a good job within the constraints of funding, US management, and the need to pander moderately to an Administration that has no regard for reality at the White House level (our flag officers and top civil servants and some political appointees such as the Secretary of Defense have rediscovered their integrity and are fighting a holding action for all of us here at home).

I would like to see two new surveys: one of all the countries they missed, and one of India alone, ideally done in partnership with the government of India. I regard India, Malaysia, and Turkey as well as Indonesia as major success stories, and the US Government does not seem to be ready to recognize that these four countries can and should be major partners in offering peace and development instead of corruption, occupation, and exploitation, to all Muslims everywhere.

Three other books within my limit of ten:
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush