No brief review can do justice to Farooq Hassan's astonishing book; rarely has this reviewer seen a study so poorly conceived and written, so badly argued, and so incompetently edited. To the extent that one can understand Mr. Hassan's argument, it seems to be a restatement of well-known Islamic fundamentalist ideas, somewhat modified for a Western audience. Mr. Hassan believes the solution to modern problems lies in the Qur'an. Anyone curious to pursue the reasoning and implications of this approach should read Sayyid Qutb, Abu al-'Ala' al-Mawdudi, Ayatullah Khumayni, or any of the other serious fundamentalist thinkers (many of whose writings are available in English), rather than Mr. Hassan's work.
Not a page goes by without an inelegant, illogical, or erroneous statement, and many pages have multiple examples. Looking at just the front matter, what does one make of acknowledgments which begin with this strange expression of gratitude: "All of the major quotations in this book are taken from the Qur'an and, as such, no formal acknowledgment is necessary" (p. v)? Or the meaningless Biblical quote which serves as an epigraph: " ... When one rules over men in righteousness, when he rules in the fear of God," and which is improperly cited? Or, at the back of the book, the biography of the author which quotes extensively from a letter to him from the White House (p. 311)?
Or the citation to "Hegel, Philosophic des Rechts, 349," which misspells the title and tells nothing about the edition Mr. Hassan used, so that "349" refers to nothing to all? Or a writing style exemplified by this sort of sentence: "In the context of the present discussion, having discussed the role of Islam in communist countries, it is now pertinent to examine the relationship of the United States, which may be taken to be the main protagonist of the non-communist world, and Islam" (p. 161)? The author is in the first place accountable for this appalling book, of course, but the University Press of America also bears responsibility for editing, publishing and distributing it. Or is this someone's idea of a way to discredit Islamic fundamentalism?
Daniel Pipes, the author of Slave Soldiers and Islam, is a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow at the Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State.
