Book Review - Islam by Karen Armstrong

Not worth your time
If you're a casual reader looking to learn more about Islam, this is not the book for you. If you're an academic, you'll feel right at home reading the incessantly dry, academic-worded style of this book, but you probably won't like the book either. The author spends an incessant amount of time on historical details that few would ever care about, but she doesn't cover them in such a way as to satisfy historians either. The only good thing one could say about this book, if coming from this point of view, is that it doesn't have a religious bias. On the contrary, it doesn't cover the religious tenants of Islam whatsoever! Moreover, the author is not honest. Every major religion has events and time periods that it's followers would rather forget (and often do), but Karen Armstrong is continuously politically correct and often an apologist. The author is full of information. It's unfortunate that she cannot write in an honest, encompassing, and educationally entertaining manner.

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