The most recommended books on Islam

This is a remarkable book that offers a clear historical overview of Islamophobia in the US, going back several centuries.

Kumar shows that it is geopolitics that shapes whether Muslims are seen as friends or enemies. Thus the origin of Islamophobia is not a problem with Islam itself, but rather in US endeavors to remain a global empire. Besides Islamophobia, the books offers clear explanations to understand terrorism, the War on Terror, and empire.

I stumbled upon Ronit Ricci’s captivating book while finalizing my own research on early modern Jewish translation in Europe. The experience of reading this book was a little like (what I can only imagine) discovering an unknown relative on 23andme must feel like.

Ricci explores the literary networks that developed during the spread of Islam through early modern South and Southeast Asia. She shows how translators from Arabic into Javanese, Malay, and Tamil developed a remarkably creative approach to translation and how they domesticated (“localized” is her preferred term) their sources, reshaping unfamiliar concepts to resonate with their target readers.

Engaging with Ricci’s book was an uncanny experience; here, in a distant translator culture, I found fascinating parallels to the issues and concerns I encountered in my own research, often approached in surprisingly similar ways. Who would have thought that Old Yiddish and Old Javanese shared such common ground?

This is probably my most-read book: It’s lyrical, lush, funny, and tragic. I come back to it whenever I feel like I’m in a reading rut. It may not be for everyone.

The narrator, Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, India’s independence day from Britain, delivers a beautiful, meandering narrative about his family and his own life, which mirrors India’s history, and the other children of midnight—all imbued with different magical powers.

Persepolis is the book that made me fall in love with graphic memoirs.

I’ve typically been more of a word person than a picture person, but Satrapi’s stark black-and-white images make such creative use of the space on the page that I was converted. I learned so much about the history of Iranian conflict from this book—through the young girl eyes of its narrator—but my favorite part is the way Satrapi visually depicts her conversations with God.

After I read this book, I started drawing images of my conversations with God into my own prayer journal.  

Daniel Schroeter’s The Sultan’s Jew focuses on the colorful life of Me'ir Macnin (d. 1835), an ambassador-at-large for two successive Moroccan sultans. Schroeter uses Macnin’s life to discuss three main topics: the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Morocco; the relationship between Moroccan Jews and the Sephardic world beyond; and Morocco’s relationship with Europe. Macnin’s ambassadorial stint in London, which eventually saw him become the president of the city’s main synagogue, also allows Schroeter to talk about the complexities of Jewish life in Britain and of Sephardic/Ashkenazic rivalries. The power of Schroeter’s work is in presenting a sophisticated political and socio-economic study through the lens of a gripping biography.

A great insight informs every aspect of this excellent book. While few historians today would put the crusades down to mere fanaticism, too many uninformed people still think of the crusades in absurdly simplistic terms of clashing civilizations, cultures, and religions. This book takes aim at that sort of ignorance by telling the history of one of the world’s great historical phenomena in a very accessible way from the perspective with which most readers will be least familiar.

Drawing on memoirs, Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen provides an engaging portrait of Yemeni Jews in the decades before their mass migration to Israel. Wagner chronicles the vast social and political challenges that Yemenis faced and how these impacted the intimate ties and sometimes formidable tensions between Jews and Muslims. His book is one of the most entertaining in Jewish studies. Like the memoir writers upon whom he draws, Wagner has an eye for a good story. We learn about Jews from all walks of life – upstanding rabbis and merchants, but also practitioners of magic, bootleggers, swindlers, and ruffians who are unafraid to brawl with Muslims. All of these stories are carefully analyzed and contextualized by Wagner, who is deeply learned in both Jewish and Islamic literature.

This is the perfect book for someone striving to understand the relevance of the crusades based on their place in the history of both the West and the Middle East. It is not a comprehensive history as is Madden’s work, but a compliment to Madden in that it shows how history has been harnessed to modern politics — usually incorrectly.

Despite its misleading title referring to Saladin’s defeat of the Christian army in July 1187, this book looks not so much at the events as the meaning of the crusades. In less than 170 pages, France explores the concepts of jihad and crusading, and describes the fateful battle of Hattin. He then goes on to analyze the immediate military and political consequences of the battle, and ends by examining how the myths surrounding this iconic battle have impacted national identity and foreign relations to the present day.

I am impressed with the author's substantial effort in examining the Holy Scriptures from the perspective of modern scientific knowledge. The author looks at various Quranic statements in the light of scientific discoveries and concludes that it can't be of human origin - that surely enhances that the Qur'an is a true Divine Book.

This book also has the noble purpose of promoting much-needed unity between the followers of Christianity and Islam and countering ignorant and false ideas about both religions. It was especially gratifying to learn of a Vatican document describing that Muslims profess the faith of Abraham and worship one God as Christians do – that gives me hope that we are all one.  

This is a book that changed my sense as to what we could know of the past. Its unlocking of the “secret” or lost religious codes of Persian miniature painting has proved utterly game-changing in the field of Islamic art.

I love it for the incredible beauty of its argumentation, as well as the gorgeousness of its close readings of medieval illuminated painting.