Following Muhammad Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World by Carl W. Ernst (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 244 pages.)

Abstract

Following Muhammad is a scholarly, but not academic, book directed at
the general reading public. Written by a religious studies scholar with an
evident sympathy for Islam, it seeks to address western prejudices about Islam by presenting a clear, concise, and accessible picture of the faith in
context. Although the author explores Islam’s historical evolution, his primary
focus is to balance this with insights into how Muslims themselves
understand their religion in contemporary as well as historical times.
Although primarily directed toward non-Muslims, whose essentialist
media-driven assumptions about Islam are constantly lamented by Ernst,
it is also of interest to the Muslim reading public as a refreshing departure
from standard accounts of Muslims and Islam. Although not a textbook,
it could be profitably used as a text for discussion in a variety of
courses.
Two key issues to which Ernst returns repeatedly are, first, the erroneous
western tendency of assuming that fundamentalists are the “true”
representatives of Islam, and, second, the importance of recognizing the
part colonialism has played in shaping contemporary developments in the
Muslim world. By drawing comparisons with Christianity, Judaism, and
other faiths, he highlights the unacceptability – and indeed absurdity – of
many generic assumptions about Islam and Muslims. Instead, he stresses
the importance of non-Muslims recognizing the diversity of faith and practice
in time and space that characterizes Islam, just as it does all other world
religions.
The book is divided into six chapters organized in a thematic rather
than a chronological manner in order to reflect the author’s self-proclaimed
emphasis on “rethinking” Islam today. Chapter 1 explores western perceptions
of, and prejudices toward, Islam in modern and medieval times and
suggests ways to avoid such prejudices in our own time. Chapter 2 looks at
what is meant by the term religion and how evolving western definitions of
religion have shaped western perceptions of other faiths, including Islam.
This is counterbalanced by a survey of how Muslims have defined Islam by
assessing its historical vocabulary and the vocabulary used by present-day
Muslims ...