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PEACE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice, by Mohammed Abu-Nimer. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003. ix + 186 pages. Notes to p. 211. Index top. 233. $55.
In the wake of 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain, and the often flippant, cursory, and dangerous way in which Islam and Muslims are portrayed in the United States and much of the West, with "bookstores in the US [__] filled with screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror," this book provides a reasoned and well explained counter-discourse, which pushes out the suffocatingly closed parameters of debate, to create a space for voices which have so far been marginalized or altogether silenced in the West.1 As such, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice is a welcome and very timely book that seeks to challenge "the stereotype of a bellicose and intolerant Islamic worldview, so widely purveyed in the Western media, [and which] has wide currency among Western policymakers as well" (pp. 1-2).
In the first section, Abu-Nimer provides a tour de force of Islamic theology, drawing out key passages in both the Qur'an and the Hadith to support his hypothesis that Islamic religion and culture are far...