What the Qurʼan meant, and why it matters

Review by Choice Review

Believing that Americans are woefully ignorant of the Koran, Wills (emer., Northwestern Univ.), a Roman Catholic, read the Koran himself in 2003. This book is about that encounter. The Koran--a pastiche of fragments and shards collected after Mohammed's death--is a foundational guiding work for world Islam and Wills explains why it matters. In the introduction, Wills equates the slavery, patriarchy, and militarism in the Koran to that of the Torah. Wills goes on to decry the secular and religious ignorance of George Bush, equating his "animal instincts" with those of Mussolini. Wills maintains that ignorance about the Koran led to the Iraq War and claims that the Iraq venture destabilized the Middle East (he makes no mention of the Arab Spring, which occurred after the Iraq War). Then there are those Wills labels the fearfully ignorant--Pamela Geller, Brigitte Gabriel, Robert Spencer. This reviewer wonders if Wills appreciates them individually or, as he appears to do, simply lumps them in with a president with whom he disagrees. These individuals speak publicly only with armed guards and Spencer was recently inadvertently drugged by an activist at an engagement. Thus these individuals' free speech has been compromised so simply labeling them ignorant is a mistake. Otherwise, this book is a valuable read. Summing Up: Recommended. With the above caveat. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --G. Mick Smith, Strayer University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

MARTIN LUTHER: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, by Eric Metaxas. (Viking, $30.) Metaxas' effort to make Luther attractive to a wide readership presents its subject as a titanic figure who rescued God from medievalism, invented individual freedom and ushered in modernity. THE STORY OF THE JEWS: Volume 2, Belonging: 1492-1900, by Simon Schama. (Ecco, $39.99.) Schama's panoramic study begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, circling around the question of whether the Jews could ever find a safe haven. Across four centuries, that quest seemed never quite attainable yet never definitely out of reach. FURNISHING ETERNITY: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, by David Giffels. (Scribner, $24.) Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through the action of building one together. MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS: Twelve Journeys Into the Medieval World, by Christopher de Hamel. (Penguin Press, $45.) A gloriously illustrated introduction to a collection of extraordinary illuminated books, conducted by a supremely learned and cheerfully opinionated guide. WHAT THE QUR'AN MEANT: And Why It Matters, by Garry Wills. (Viking, $25.) When a leading Catholic intellectual reads the Quran, especially one as attuned to language as Wills, the result is a delight. He challenges religious and secular ignorance, yielding an overview that is both elegant and insightful. THE EXODUS, by Richard Elliott Friedman. (HarperOne, $27.99.) Friedman seeks to answer, once and for all: Was there an exodus from Egypt? He insists there was, just not quite the way the Bible describes; his Exodus story is really the tale of how the people we call Levites left Egypt and joined up with the Israelites already in Canaan. WHERE THE WILD COFFEE GROWS: The Untold Story of Coffee From the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup, by Jeff Koehler. (Bloomsbury, $28.) An absorbing, almost Tolkienesque narrative of politics, ecology and economics that documents the spread of (the misnamed) Coffea Arabica. THE BOOK OF SEPARATION: A Memoir, by Tova Mirvis. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Mirvis tells an intimate tale of departure - of leaving the Modern Orthodox community that served as the inspiration for her first two novels, and of leaving her marriage too. She movingly conveys the heartache that accompanies the abandonment of one way of life in search of another. SLEEP NO MORE, by P. D. James. (Knopf, $21.) Half a dozen murderous tales from the late great crime fiction writer. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Evaluating a work written in Arabic without an adequate Arabic background is difficult. Relying on translations as diverse as those of the Qur'an to write commentary is even more difficult. Pulitzer Prize-winning religious scholar Wills (The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis, 2015) draws on his background as a devout Catholic and historian as he presents his unique understanding of what the Qur'an says about Islam and carefully compares both faiths. In the introduction, Wills shares the challenges he faced and identifies the barriers, primarily social and political, that other American non-Muslims interested in reading and learning about the Qur'an will have to address. Wills then explicates various aspects of the Qur'an, including Islamic prophets, caring for the community, Jihad, Sharia, and women and the veil. Wills' expositions are not always clear at first reading, yet the result is a useful and worthy interpretation that non-Muslims will find illuminating and most moderate Muslims will largely agree with. Best-selling Wills' stature will draw many readers, who will, hopefully, pursue further reading.--Hassanali, Muhammed Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Having translated the messages of the Christian Gospels and Paul's epistles, Wills (Why Priests?) now attempts to explain the Qur'an in plain language. Wills situates his account within the context of the "global war on terror" and provides a generous reading of the Qur'an that resists oversimplification at each turn. However, it is somewhat audacious to say this is a book about "what the Qur'an meant" when the author admits he cannot read the Qur'an in Arabic and has little background in Islamic studies. Furthermore, Catholic Christianity, the Bible, and biblical interpretation loom large throughout the text. Thus, this is best viewed as a work of intimate and charitable interreligious dialogue in practice. Insights and explanations that will most benefit a general readership often come from sources that Wills has conveniently synthesized. Relying heavily on The Study Qur'an and several other secondary sources, the book bounces between what the Qur'an actually meant (and what specific Islamic sects believe) and what Wills thinks it means. Wills addresses issues that the Qur'an is concerned with (submission to Allah, the mercy and forgiveness of Allah, worship, civil relations, marriage), but he too often focuses on the topics that matter more to suspicious Westerners than to many everyday Muslims: war, women's rights, and violence in general. Ironically, the book could exacerbate some of the decontextualized readings of the text that it seeks to contest. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wills (What Jesus Meant) discusses the problems caused by being ignorant about Islam, addressing this issue by focusing on the substance and character of the Qur'an. Wills writes for the general reader, showing that when interpreted in its historical context, the Qur'an is shown to be a book of peace. While Muslim extremists have used this sacred work to justify violence, the same has taken place in Christianity, as when religious leaders and others used the Bible to provide support for the Crusades. The book has two parts, with the first one addressing how secular, religious, and fear-based ignorance can be costly, particularly as shown through the U.S. government's response to 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The second part, which comprises the majority of the text, provides an introduction to the Qur'an. Topics such as Islamic prophets, zeal (Jihad), the right path (Shari'ah), commerce, and the role or women in Islam are discussed. Wills believes that a fair reading of the Qur'an helps correct false ideas about it and about Islam in general. VERDICT Recommended for those interested in gaining a basic understanding of the Qur'an. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]-John Jaeger, Arlington, TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wills (Emeritus, History/Northwestern Univ.; The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis, 2015, etc.) defends the Quran in this layperson's review.Looking at the sacred text of Islam with unashamedly Western and inexpert eyes, the author finds that little of what most non-Muslims think about the book is true. In the first quarter of the book, Wills explains the impetus for studying the Quran: the West's many post-9/11 blunders in the Middle East. The author does not mince words, arguing that the conservatives in the George W. Bush administration rushed into a war with a people, culture, and religion they failed to understand. Given an age of ignorance and fear, writes Wills, "it is time for us to learn about the real Islam, beginning with its source book." The author goes on to explore various aspects of the Quran, often comparing it to the Old Testament and often pointing out popular misconceptions and quotes taken out of context in the West. While being clear that "the terrorists in modern Islam are not knowledgeable of their own religion in either profession or practice," Wills focuses not on Muslims who misread the text but on Westerners who misread it or, more to the point, never read it at all. He points out that in cases of less-than-kind passages, Christianity and Judaism have such lines of scripture of their own (such as prohibitions against apostasy). Wills goes further to note that harsh acts described by the Quran have been equaled or even surpassed in Christian history as well. Compare, he suggests, the Quranic rule about amputating a hand or foot with the realities of 16th-century tortures and executions of heretics in England. Wills has good reason to share his own reading and study of the Quran with a populace largely ignorant of its contents, but he does so in a vacuum, unattached from the many cultural expressions of this sacred text's adherents. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Secular Ignorance The amazing thing about our Iraq war is not that we made such a colossal misjudgment, igniting the long-term series of explosions that have given us the Islamic State, but that we did it so blithely. It was supposed to spread peace and freedom throughout the region. It has instead spread death; it has uprooted populations; it has reanimated hatreds. It was presented as a generous favor we were doing the country, almost like picking up a person hit by a car. It was such an easy thing to do that it would be criminally idiotic not to do it. Supporters of the war vied with each other on this theme, each striving to make it seem easier than the other. No one in authority showed any awareness that there were religious grounds for the opposition of a Shia majority to Saddam's government using Sunni businessmen, Ba'ath Party members, and army officers to rule the country. It was all just a secular conflict between people yearning for American-style democracy and a despot. Since the people of Iraq wanted their freedom, and we were giving it to them, what could go wrong? George W. Bush: "We're not going to have any casualties." George W. Bush: "It was unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Dick Cheney: "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . It will go relatively quickly . . . weeks rather than months. . . . The streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy." Dick Cheney: "Once we start this, Saddam is toast." Donald Rumsfeld: "[Our military] can do the job and finish it fast . . . five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. . . . It has nothing to do with the religion." Kenneth Adelman: "Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." . . . "Desert Storm II would be a walk in the park." Paul Wolfowitz: "They will greet us as liberators, and that will help us keep [troop] requirements down." Richard Perle: "Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. . . . Now it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either." George Tenet: "It's a slam dunk." Giddy self-congratulations were raining all over the landscape before ever a bomb was dropped on Iraq. To judge from such program notes, we might have been engaging in a musical-comedy war, or joining the Marx Brothers in happy combat over Freedonia. At first, the cheerful war seemed a hit, fulfilling the rhetorical investment of its producers. Within three weeks, Baghdad fell and Saddam's statue was photogenically pulled down. By the sixth week, President Bush suited up in battle jacket, navy helmet, and ejection harness, then climbed into "Navy One," an S-3B Viking warplane, and-after a few minutes' (thirty-mile) flight-was landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which was decorated with a huge banner, made by the White House, declaring "Mission Accomplished." After walking photogenically around the deck in his flight gear for half an hour, the president changed into a civilian suit and delivered a speech declaring, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Chris Matthews said of Bush on TV: "He won the war." The navy warplane, after taking the president back to land, was put on permanent display in the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Busts of Bush in his flight jacket were offered for sale online. So were action figure toys of him in the full gear he wore on the carrier deck. The war had seemed miraculously easy. Democracy had come to the Middle East. Though it is usually tendentious to invoke Fascism, there is one resemblance here to Mussolini's theatrical approach to war. As Denis Mack Smith wrote: Mussolini also by instinct saw the usefulness of creating the impression that he could win easily and without great disturbance to the ordinary life of the nation. . . . Fascism continued to think it a matter for boasting that so little was demanded from Italy and that there was no general mobilization. To put this differently, resources were considered to be less usefully spent in war production than in fueling the great propaganda industry that was trying to convince ordinary citizens that all was well. Even as the Iraq cakewalk was turning into a death trap, a chipper tone was maintained by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who dismissed the riot of looting with the words, "Stuff happens." Sunni insurgents were only "pockets of dead-enders," he maintained. And "freedom's untidy." This just proved that freedom had come to Freedonia. Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's undersecretary who had predicted that Iraqis would throw flowers on the arriving U.S. troops, was asked why this did not happen. He said the citizens were still afraid of Saddam, even after he was overthrown, but "they had flowers in their minds." To materialize these flowers in the Iraqis' minds was a task given to President Bush's personal proconsul for Iraq, Paul Bremer. He decided that all the remnants of Saddam's dictatorship should be erased. He began with the Ba'ath Party, whose largely Sunni membership included many business leaders, administrators, and security officers. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, alerted him to what a CIA expert had warned: "If you put this [order] out, you're going to drive between 30,000 and 50,000 Ba'athists underground before nightfall. You will put 50,000 people on the street, underground and mad at Americans." And those 50,000 were the most powerful, well-connected elites from all walks of life. Ousting the Ba'ath Party was bad enough; but a week later Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, planning to create a new one out of thin air. Overnight some 385,000 soldiers, plus another 285,000 employees of the Ministry of Interior-the home of police and domestic security services-were without jobs. Abruptly terminating the livelihood of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonized, politicized men, many of whom were armed. It also represented a major setback in restoring order. As Colonel John Agoglia, the deputy chief of planning at Central Command, said, "That was the day we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." Bremer had given the motive and the means for an insurgency that has never ended. The chain of disasters initiated then has been facilely explained in retrospect, and the explanations are as misconceived as was the rationale for the war. We are still being told that we went to war only because "the intelligence was bad." The CIA gets blamed for telling President Bush that (a) Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack; and (b) Saddam had or was rapidly getting weapons of mass destruction; and (c) because of 9/11 and because of WMD we had to remove him instantly by "regime change." Much subsequent debate about the Iraq war has been concentrated on repeating or refuting these three assertions. But all three miss the real point. There was a clearly announced plan for removing Saddam even before the 9/11 attacks, even before George W. Bush was elected president, and the plan was actually carried out by some of those who first proposed it. In January 1998, when Bill Clinton was still president, he received an open letter from the Project for the New American Century, signed by past and future members of Republican administrations, along with some academics and activists, numbering eighteen in all. The letter, published three and a half years before the 9/11 attacks, called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power," a removal by force, since "diplomacy is clearly failing." It urged this course "to protect our vital interests in the Gulf" and for the safety "of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states." President Clinton was told that he must act on his own to avoid being "crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council." What was this Project for the New American Century? It was a group founded a year earlier by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, whose program had been published in Foreign Affairs (July/August 1996) as "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." The Project's "Statement of Principles" was signed in 1997 by twenty-five men and women, including future vice president Dick Cheney and future secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. The group had a regular outlet for its views, since Kristol had launched in 1995 a journal, the Weekly Standard, founded with the help of $3 million every year from Australian-born publishing baron Rupert Murdoch. Their practical goal was stated in a Weekly Standard editorial titled "Saddam Must Go." This was published on November 17, 1997, almost four years before the attacks of September 11, 2001. A mere week after those attacks, the Project authors wrote another open letter to a president, this time to George Bush, repeating what had been urged on President Clinton. It was signed by forty-one people, those who had signed the first letter (minus some who had already entered the Bush administration) plus new recruits to the cause. It is no wonder that when the attacks occurred, veterans of the Project like Cheney and Rumsfeld recognized at once that this was their chance to do what they had long been advocating-take out Saddam. Rumsfeld remembered that his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, brought this up with President Bush at Camp David immediately after 9/11, where he said, "Iraq must have been helping them" (those who attacked the World Trade Center). Wolfowitz was just acting on his earlier plea that the U.S. should strike Iraq as soon as "we find the right way to do it." The right way was found on 9/11. In two sentences, the Project's new letter brushed past the al-Qaeda forces that brought down the towers, to concentrate again (in six sentences) on the main target, Saddam Hussein (who had nothing to do with the attack): It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who had himself supported the war but on different grounds, was not exaggerating when he said the immediate concentration on Iraq came from the Project for the New American Century, whose members were now called the neoconservatives: It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this [New York] office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. Why did the Project focus so early and ardently on Saddam? He was just one element in that "policy for a new century" that Kristol and Kagan had outlined in Foreign Affairs and incorporated in the Project's Statement of Principles. That Project grew from a grand vision of the world after Ronald Reagan's defeat of Communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a unipolar world, where only one superpower remained. After such an enormous struggle, one might expect, there should be a stepping down of massive military expenditures. The Project said this would be a shirking of duty. According to those planning "the new American century," America should arm and spend to get all the benefits of a "benevolent global hegemony." Though George W. Bush had campaigned against "nation building," and said his administration would have a "humble" foreign policy, 9/11 made him adopt the unipolar vision of the neoconservatives, for which they applauded him. Speaking at West Point on June 1, 2002, the president said, "The United States possesses unprecedented-and unequaled-strength and influence in the world. . . . This position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity." The State Department followed Bush's lead, issuing a new strategy in September of 2002, to "use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe." This was a momentous shift in policy, framed precisely to justify the invasion of Iraq. The earlier policy had been one of containment and deterrence. The new one was for regime change and preemption. Since international Communism no longer constricted us, we could bring democracies into being and strengthen them, toppling tyrants with our unmatched power. We must not, according to the Weekly Standard, be "unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities of global leadership." One of the easy (but neglected) topplings had been that of Saddam in 1990, when the first President Bush threw him out of Kuwait. The Kristol folk condemned Bush I's failure to finish that easy task, and meant to complete it as an old order of business before going on to the new democracies America would set up. A typical publication in the Weekly Standard at this time (October 15, 2001) was Max Boot's "The Case for American Empire," which detailed all the good things to be accomplished by "a liberal and humanitarian imperialism." Doing them was admittedly "a long-term task" that would mean not only maintaining but increasing American power. Once we had toppled Saddam, we would need the resources to reap all the benefits from turning Iraq into "a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East." With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us. Over the years, America has earned opprobrium in the Arab word for its realpolitik backing of repressive dictators like Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of East Europe. The Bush administration was so eager to seize the opportunity to topple Saddam that it could not wait for Commissioner Hans Blix to finish the International Atomic Energy Agency's search for weapons of mass destruction on the ground in Iraq-instead, Wolfowitz had the CIA investigate Blix. Bush assembled a "Coalition of the Willing," states willing to join the war on Iraq-a coalition that was made up largely of small states that were given increased American foreign aid in return for using their names. The only important member of the "coalition" was the United Kingdom, and Prime Minister Tony Blair's engineering of that move has deeply blackened his historical record. The French were vilified in Congress for not joining the coalition-a committee had congressional cafeterias change their menu item "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries"-a sneer that remained on the menus for three years. Excerpted from What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters by Garry Wills All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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