About book How To Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, And The End Of The War On Terror (2009)
Overall, this book was almost exactly what I was after. It's well-written, well-reasoned, and well-supported with citations and plenty of background. My two gripes are:1) there are some places where the author pieces together one-liners from various experts. I immediately felt like the author was trying to convince me of a particular point-of-view rather than presenting the topic from differing perspectives. Also, the context from which these quotes were drawn isn't clear to the reader. Simply including fewer quotations or the author including his own line of reasoning would have been preferable. 2) The book is readily accessible, but there are one or two places where the author goes off on pretty esoteric tangents. It reads as though it's meant to straddle the divide between general audience non-fiction and an academic work. Oddly enough, I felt that this somehow provided additional credibility to the author.Brief synopsis & comments on the text:This book discusses the origins and current states of Islamism, Christianism, and Zionism and their parallels in ideology and rhetoric. Aslan makes the case that Jihadism parallels the War on Terror and that the only way to eliminate both is to promote democracy; in particular, he argues that the availability of moderately nationalistic/religious political parties within a country reduces the level of support for extremist groups (a la Turkey and Indonesia). The argument that suicide bombers are similar to the Zealots of the Old Testament -- in the sense that they may believe that they are acting on God's orders, as opposed to being madmen or compelled by extreme hopelessness -- was thought-provoking. However, it's not clear how prevalent this motivation might be, especially given that the author presents a U. of Chicago study which finds that ~1/3 of modern suicide attacks are conducted by secular groups. The book was published just after Barack Obama first took office and the epilogue includes plenty hope for new direction in American foreign policy. It would be interesting to hear Aslan's perspective on the last five years. A facetious reviewer might subtitle this book "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Islamism." I won't, because I'm not sure whether even a panel of experts on the book's subject could agree on how many stars to give it. In its favor, the book is a short, easy-to-read 173 pages asserting first a difference between Islamism and Jihadism and looking at a history of religious-inspired social movements from Masada to the present (not in that order).Aslan devotes key parts of his analysis to the mind-set and backgrounds of the better known terrorists - 9/11 and 7/7 - in an effort to dispel Western stereotypes and direct attention to what he feels are the real origins of terrorist acts. Noting that militant jihadists typically spring from middle-class, educated families living in Europe, he ascribes their behavior to a youthful inability to forge a cross-cultural identity, while sympathizing with real and perceived oppression of Muslims everywhere and embracing a kind of religious extremism that actually rejects traditional Islam.While some may pick up on his criticism of American foreign policies and the Bush/Rice years, many pages of Aslan's book actually sing the praises of American-style democracy, freedom of expression and religious tolerance. While maintaining that the only way to win a cosmic war (where Ultimate Reality is a Struggle between the Forces of Good and Evil) is to not fight one at all, he argues that the best way to deflate the perceived dangers of Islamists is to grant them participation in democratically run governments - an option that oppressive Middle East governments have generally rejected, with the tacit approval of the U.S.Summed up like this, the argument of the book has the feel of something that could be very thin and insubstantial - more a matter of faith than a conviction based on more thorough analysis and research. Still, for an introduction to the issues, Aslan does a good job of opening up the subject for readers whose knowledge of Islam and the Middle East is no deeper than what can be gleaned from CNN. I'm settling on 4 stars for that reason alone.
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Insightful and thought provoking analysis of religious radicalism.
—krissy627
Reza Aslan always writes well and with valuable insight
—irfan576
Every conservative wing-nut needs to read this book
—annalisa
Highly recommended read for today's world.
—Leslye
