A Fury for God

The Islamist Attack on America

By Malise Ruthven

2002

First Published

3.66

Average Rating

335

Number of Pages

10H13M

Audio Length

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were carried out by men steeped in a certain Islamic ideology, which has come to be called Islamism. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven first reconstructs the events of September 11 and the war in Afghanistan. He traces the role of the idea of "jihad" and examines the permissibility of suicide in Islam, and reconstructs the world view of Islamist intellectuals like Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker who has influenced an entire generation of radicals in the Arab world, notably Osama bin Laden. He also shows that it would be a mistake to treat these people as medieval fanatics—their attitude to modernity is dangerous and ambivalent. And in a changing analysis, the author exposes the crucial importance of the Saudi connection, the massive sponsorship of "fundamentalism" by an authoritarian tribal regime that has been tolerated by the international community for the sake of Western economic stability. Ruthven's identification of the ambiguities in Western policy is powerfully provocative.

Avg Rating

3.66

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

20%

4 STARS

40%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Malise Ruthven

Author · 9 books

Malise Ruthven is the author of Islam in the World, The Divine Supermarket: Shopping for God in America, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam and several other books. His Islam: A Very Short Introduction has been published in several languages, including Chinese, Korean, Romanian, Polish, Italian and German. A former scriptwriter with the BBC Arabic and World Services, Dr Ruthven holds an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. He has taught Islamic studies, cultural history and comparative religion at the University of Aberdeen, the University of California, San Diego, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and Colorado College. Now a full-time writer, he is currently working on Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction and Arabesque and Crucifix, a study in comparative religious iconography.