Hazhir Teimourian

From Muhammad to Bin Laden

Islamic Imperialism: A History

By

Yale University Press 276pp £19.99 order from our bookshop

The question of whether militant Islamists are true followers of their faith, rather than deviants from it (as is often claimed by politicians), is probably one of the most pertinent today. Certainly it has been taxing this commentator on the Middle East for over thirty years. The difficulty remains in how we set out to answer it. Should we go back to the Koran for its original commandments and study how the founder of the faith himself interpreted them? Or should we try to see how, down the ages, those principles have been put into practice by Muslim leaders, including those who only pretended an attachment to the faith out of expediency?

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    • We've just stumbled on a gem from the LR archive. The emoluments page from May 1995, in which one reviewer asked to… ,
    Follow Us