(May 22, 2014 at 1:41 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: I put An Abridged Koran by Bill Warner on my reading list. Is that the best one for a mainstream, "moderate" commentary?
That's the first time I hear about that book. Looks interesting. As said, the repetitive nature of the Quran and the lack of contextualization makes it often horrible reading, at least for a "non-believer". I guess such work can deliver the ideological/doctrinal aspects of Islam and shed some light on what kinds of possibilities of interpretation the text offers.
But of course, the price of readability the text must close some possibilities of interpretation. In Amazon someone complained that the word meaning "non-believer" is translated in the text as "jew". Now, even if "non-believer" refers to jews in historical context, there is a huge difference in which term you use: do you refer to the particular jews as "non-believers" or as "jews". I hope the work has index for translation of each verse so that you can also check what the other translations say from, e.g. quran.com.
I don't know Bill Warner, but he is certainly very critical of the object of his study (participant in Jihad watch, etc). Well, I am also a critic of Islam(I am not actually a muslim, which, I guess, I should have said in the first place), but such point of view can also lead to biases.
But yes, I do think that at least a good deal of the "mainstream" Islam represents a type of Islamism, that is to say, "political Islam": it is just "moderate Islamism" (they don't accept suicide bombings, etc, and are not as rigid in their interpretation of Sharia). So, Warner's interpretation could, I think, be very enlightening, if it stresses this side of things, although it can also be the case that you only learn what you can read from Robert Spencer's books. He seems to be a serious scholar, but he might tend too much towards "fundamentalist" interpretation and forget that also versions of political Islam exist which are not necessarily that incompatible with "Western" values. I think he too aptly speaks of Islam in singular, by which I do not mean I am for some postmodernist "anything goes" criterion of identity.
