Islam: The Basics

The book is wonderful. It makes sense and provides an accurate history of Islam as well as the truly important foundations of the belief. Great buy.The seller sent the book quickly and was, for the most part as described. However, it said it may have some highlighting, when really there is a ton of highlighting. It's pretty messy highlighting. However, for the most part the highlighting has helped me to skim through the reading and understand the basics without needing to read the whole thing every time.

Came before the estimated delivery. Just as described.

I recommend this to anyone looking to learn just the basics about Islam.

Thank you.

Islam: The Basics does a reasonably good job of describing modern Muslim practices and beliefs, and explaining them to a Christian audience.That said, the book is poorly organized, with sections on history popping up throughout (and then also in the appendix), Sunni and Shi'ite beliefs are interspersed with Sufism, and all-in-all it is difficult to tell in Islam: The Basics what applies to what.Another limitation of the book is that it is particularly apologetic, ignoring Islamic history when it is convenient to do so. No citations are ever given, and so some of the controversial claims regarding Islam that this books makes are impossible to verify, as well.I would recommend this book for anyone who knows virtually nothing about Islam, and would like an explanation of Islam from a biased pro- liberal Islam perspective.I expect that for most people, the Wikipedia article on Islam would be more informative and helpful than this book, however.

Turner wrote something very insensitive about 9/11 in the second half of the book (something about how it would have "smacked of delicious irony" but for how tragic it was). Further, Turner makes a conclusion about the spread of Islam that ignores a vast array of facts and contradicts other passages in his own book.If you want to learn about Islam, you should look at a different book. Almost anything, I'm sure, would be better than this one. I second the suggestion in an earlier review that someone interested in learning about Islam is better served by looking at Wikipedia than buying this book.