Islam in Captivity

Description

Since the launch of the newspaper “Al-Naqid” in the summer of 1988, Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum has been its most controversial writer, its most daring in challenging prevailing metaphysical notions about Islam, and its most provocative writer for those with simplistic thinking. He is also the writer who has preoccupied every censor in the Arab media, perhaps more than any other well-known writer to date. And as much as Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum preoccupied the censors, he preoccupied the readers.

During the three years of “Al-Naqid’s” existence, the number of letters it received, both for and against him (the latter outweighing the former), exceeded that received by any other writer who appeared in its pages. Readers took up their pens and sharpened them in response to Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum’s opinions. Therefore, the author of this book, in preparing it, wanted to include within its pages all the opinions that Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum presented and that readers responded to and that were published in “Al-Naqid,” so that the book would be comprehensive and democratic, and thus maintain its controversial nature. Returning to the content of this book, “Islam in Captivity,” we find it to be a polemical work that often demands the impossible in order to achieve the possible. But above all, it is a revolutionary book, in every sense of the word, with its raw intensity and truth, devoid of ambiguity, fear, or pretense. It challenges the Arab mind, closed off by its traditional, submissive concepts. It is a missionary work that simplifies the straightforward and bold concepts of Islam, after stripping away all the mystification surrounding them. This book is also a book of questions—fundamental historical questions capable of inciting a demand for new Arab cultural concepts, directly relevant to the thinking of ordinary people. Through these questions, Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum attempts to create, through this incitement, a culture of democratic Islam, one that is in tune with the times and contributes to its civilizational meanings, thus opening up avenues for its engagement with the 21st century.