Islam Lippman Lippman\'s Balanced Perspective

Islam Lippman

Lippman's balanced perspective on Islam

The Islamic faith represents one of the most widely spread and acknowledged religions in the world. Often misunderstood and even more often exploited, members of the Muslim faith have developed an identity in the modern world which is problematically associated to such issues as conflict and terrorism. However, an examination of Islam finds it to be a deeply complex faith based in a rich history of tradition. First and foremost to that tradition is the relevance of its theological code of laws to everyday life of observant Muslims. Such is the perspective taken by Thomas W. Lippman, whose 1995 text Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World, is effective at introducing Islam from a sociological perspective. This way of framing the discussion helps to make the political, spiritual and ideological struggles of the Muslim faith more comprehensible to the western perspective.

One of the important and foundational principles of the Lippman text is the idea that the adherents to Islam will often approach their faith according to such conditions as ethnicity, national culture, family background and interpretation of Islamic law. Known as the Shariah, the Islamic code for living is itself produced by a coalescence of sources found in its contextual surrounding. As Lippman denotes, "in Islam, as in Christianity, there are differences between what the believers are taught by their faith and what they actually think and do. For instance, while there is no Muslim priesthood, the mullahs of Iran, who are often referred to as clergy, hold a special place in the form of Islam practiced there." (3)

As the tensions and conflicts of the present moment in history demonstrate, many of the practices which have come into prominence seem to contrast some of the underlying pretenses of Islam. The use of violence in Islam is a particular point of inflect for the Lippman text, which judiciously investigates the manner in which both Western comprehension and fundamentalist practice seem to distort meanings in order to define this practice. Namely, as acts of 'terrorism' are waged against the supposed enemy of Islam under the term "Jihad," Lippman considers this to be "the most overused and ill-understood word in contemporary Islam." (113)

In a large respect, this is because geopolitical circumstances have created many defensive and militant segments of the global Muslim population. The exploitation of the term Jihad is one of the primary practices of those armed extremist groups postured in opposition to the west. Lippman's text provides some excellent insight in this regard, noting that Jihad is taken generally as a call to "holy war" but that this is a pointedly selective interpretation of its meaning. In actuality, the term means "utmost effort." (113) While Lippman does not preclude therefore the possibility of violence as being encompassed by the utmost effort in defense of Islam, the conflictive relationship between Islam and the colonizing forces of Europe in centuries past, the occupation of the British Empire and the intrusion of the United States have all caused this single interpretation to overshadow all others. The result is a focus in Lippman's text on the ways that Islam has attained its negative image in the west.