Islam Between East and West by Alija Ali Izetbegovic. Published by: The American Trust Publications, Indianapolis, Indiana 46232, U.S.A. Price: $12.00 (paper)

Abstract

Islam Between East and West is a remarkable work of multidisciplinary
scholarship by a Bosnian Muslim lawyer who is currently serving a fourteen-year
term in a Yugoslavian prison for his Islamic activism and “fundamentalist
digressions”. Educated in Sarajevo and Paris, Alija Ali Izetbegovic has
been active in Islamic work throughout his adult life. Writing, lecturing, and
organizing Islamic educational and welfare activities, he has been a constant
source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for thousands of young Yugoslavian
Muslims.
Alija’s main objective in this book is to examine the roots of the cultural
crisis, moral anarchy and political upheavals of the modern West and to show
how these are related to the influence of partial truths and reductionist
ideological perspective.
The central thesis of this book is that there are three distinct views of the
world that reflect three different elemental possibilities: the religious, the
materialistic, and the Islamic. Islamic worldview is integral in that it
combines both pure religiosity and pure materialism. While pure religion emphasizes
conscience and pure materialism emphasizes nature, the focus of
Islam is on man who lives in the worlds of both conscience and nature.
The author then shows how both pure religion (Christianity, Hinduism and
Buddhism) and materialistic philosophies (Socialism and Capitalism) have
given partial answers to life’s integral questions of “ideals” and “interests” and
how they have been trying to compensate for their primal inadequacies and
half-truths through continuous compromises in both theory and praxis. The
author argues on the basis of considerable historical evidence that the actual
realization of these two opposing views of the world has been quite different
from what they originally aspired to achieve. A modified, post-renaissance
humanist interpretation of Christianity and the religio-moral basis of socialist
egalitarianism with its teleological view of history clearly demonstrates that ...