Brave, With Help

In an earlier post, I noted my interest in a book which I was uncertain about seeking out. I did not get around to hunting down the title, but my hope is that this is more due to having a brain like... one of those things with holes for straining water through.. a sieve! (apologies to the late, great Douglas Adams) than lack of courage. Fortunately for me, a redoubtable colleague found the title for me.

I promptly ordered Sayyid Qutb's In the Shade of the Qur'an and am about 100 pages in. As frequently happens in cases like this, it is a slippery slope. It is definitely a pro-Islam tract, as one would expect, but almost nothing in it speaks to me of the appalling treatment of women by the Taliban (just as nothing in the Qur'an does) or a justification for requiring farmers to grow drug crops rather than food in order to finance people blowing other people up, or other acts of extremism. In other words, while there are aspects of the book I disagree with philosophically and others I don't get due to cultural differences, I don't find it (so far at least) to be that extreme.

This is where the slippery slope comes in. The foreward noted that the author was a martyr to his cause, but seems to assume the reader knows all about him already. I don't. Therefore, this text makes me want to learn more about his history and to re-read the Qur'an besides in order to place his words in context and see if I can see the incitement to violence, the presupposed inherent danger of this work. So far no men in dark glasses and suits have come to the door to search for seditionist materials, scare my cat and comment on how long it's been since I've dusted anything, so I will probably put him on my list of people to learn more about. If I really want to get myself in trouble, I should order a book about Sayyid at the same time as something on Aryan (read pre-Hindu India) history.

Or maybe nobody's paying that much attention to me at all.