Learning About Islam: From Ignorance to Understanding.

• Author: Tua, Benjamin

Since the September 2001 Al Qaida attacks on the United States, American ignorance of Islam and the Muslim world has decreased somewhat. This progress has occurred despite the efforts of some who seek to discourage increased understanding of the world's second largest religion, because that would defeat their efforts to demonize an entire faith. After all, "knowing something about Islam is an even stronger predictor of low Islamophobia than is knowing a Muslim personally" according to the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding's "American Muslim Poll 2019: Predicting and Preventing Islamophobia".

Efforts to portray Muslims and their faith as threatening diminish our society by stigmatizing a significant American minority. They also can facilitate costly foreign policy blunders such as the 2017 Executive Order banning entry into the US of visitors from several Middle Eastern majority-Muslim countries, an order purportedly based on terrorist activity, technical hurdles to properly document these countries' travelers, and poor coordination with US officials.

Two recent books, "Mohammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" and "What the Qur'an Meant: And Why it Matters," take on the task of broadening Americans' still unacceptably low understanding of Islam. The authors--Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and Garry Wills, a Pulitzer Prize winning lay scholar of American Catholicism--approach their subject in distinctly different manners. Yet, their message and conclusions are remarkably similar--namely, that ignorance of and distortions of Islam and what the Quran says both alienate vast numbers of Muslims and have led to foreign policy missteps. The books complement each other nicely.

Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires by Juan Cole

Cole's 2018 volume is concise but dense. For a book that, as the author tells the reader, "has been gestating for decades," it is remarkably short--208 pages of text. But it includes 85 pages of supportive notes, a 16-page index and, especially valuable, 61 excerpts from some 28 of the 114 surahs (chapters) of the Qur'an (The Recitation). The excerpts buttress Cole's argument that the Qur'an and early Islam were strongly imbued with values of compromise and peacemaking.

The book will be of interest to scholars with substantial knowledge of Islam. But it also is perfect for the reader who knows little about Mohammad's life and origins as a member of a...