Don't be too hard on ol' Melvil. From his perspective, there was a lot to know about Christianity, and a cursory understanding of other religions was adequate for life in his world. Besides, the beauty of the decimal system is that you can just keep adding digits! So there's plenty of room not only for the big ones, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, but also for the ancient and lesser-known belief systems. I played it kind of safe and picked from three of what are usually called "the world's major religions."
The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd seeks to syncretize the Zen Buddhist illustrations and meditations known as The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures with the Christian's quest for God. I really want to be interested in Buddhism, but this presentation, like that of Karen Armstrong, just ended up irritating me, so I didn't get far with it.
Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, was a very different book that somehow also wound up being inexplicably unreadable. It interwove the stories of a Christian pastor and Albom's own childhood rabbi, and really should have held my interest. It was a memoir. It was about my two favorite religions. It was pretty short. It had been made into a Hallmark movie, for crying out loud! But maybe that was my problem: too much tell, not enough show, and an oversimplification of what Muriel Spark called "the only problem."
Desperately Seeking Paradise is the volume I might have actually read all of if life hadn't intervened. Ziauddin Sardar seems to have assigned himself a sort of odyssey through the Islamic world, evaluating different mazhab (ways; we would say denominations) and ultimately deciding that what is needed is a rebuilding of Islamic culture from the ground up. What little I was able to read of this book before I had to return it gave me an interesting snapshot of one man's experiences growing up Islamic in England, and then of his great ambitions as he got older.
I can sympathize with his concerns: while we might look at the Islamic world and see people who refuse to adapt to modernity, he sees people who have adapted in all the wrong ways. One interesting example mentioned in the part of the book I could get to was science. The Arabic world famously gave us much of modern mathematics, including algebra and the powerful concept of place value, but of late, according to Sardar, intellectual inquiry has been abandoned in favor of Western technologies for resource exploitation. He fantasizes about an Islamic science that would focus on a stewardship approach to the problems of the Islamic world. Not an idea I ever would have thought of on my own, but an obviously good one as soon as one hears it!
I notice that the one book I read with real enjoyment wasn't easy or short or full of pretty pictures, and more importantly, it didn't try to tell me that someone else's experience and beliefs were similar to mine. It actually assumed that someone else's experience and beliefs were completely foreign to me, and let me make my own connections if I could. I didn't need to be told that some devout Muslim intellectuals are like some devout Christian intellectuals, seeking renewal not just of their ethics but of their whole approach to culture-- Sardar just shared his own journey, and I noticed the similarity to Francis Schaeffer all by myself. Whether this makes Sardar and Schaeffer both right, both misguided, or locked in an eternal combat of ideas, is another discussion....
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