About this item
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, an erudite, hugely informative portrait of the God of Islam, the world's second largest, fastest-growing, and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion.Who is Allah? What makes Him unique? And what does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? In the spirit of his Pulitzer Prize-winning God, a trailblazing "biography" of the protagonist of the Old Testament, and Christ, his brilliant portrait of biblical Jesus, acclaimed religious scholar Jack Miles undertakes to answer these questions with his characteristic perspicacity, intelligence, and command of the subject. Miles depicts a "character" less mercurial than Yahweh, less ready to forgive than Christ, and yet emphatically part of their traditions. God in the Qur'an revises and perfects: His purpose is to make whole what had been corrupted or lost from the practices and scriptures of the earlier Abrahamic religions. Setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an side by side, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings and His temperament, and in doing so revises that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from our conception of the heart of Islam. Miles writes, "I hope [that by reading this book] you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door, thinking of him as someone whose religion, after all, may not be so wildly unreasonable that someone holding to it could not be a trusted friend."
About the Author
Dear Fellow Reader:Let's keep reading, shall we? I myself would rather read than write. I'd also rather think than read, and I'd rather dream than think. But this world is not made for dreamers, and so sometimes when I find myself thinking about something, I write about it if no one else has written the book I want to read. Mine is a crazy-quilt background. I'm an ex-Jesuit, an ex-atheist, an ex-journalist, an ex-professor, and currently I'm--well, for the further particulars, you can check me out at www.JackMiles.com. I write about religion, literature, and politics in ever-changing combinations, sometimes veering a bit into music or visual art. Arthur Koestler wrote about the great early astronomer Johannes Kepler that the man never wrote a page that was not alive and kicking. Pages are alive and kicking when their author is after something. It can be something grand: Kepler was after the orbits of the planets. It can be something small: a dog can be after a flea with great intensity. If that's the kind of reading you go for, well, I hope we meet someday! You're my kind of reader.Jack Miles
