Summary
Title: God's Law or Man's Law: The Fundamentalist Challenge to Secular Rule
Author: Laina Farhat-Holzman
Publisher: Nontheless Press
ISBN: 0972159916
Pro:
• Nice description of fundamentalist movements, goals, and actions in many countries
• Provides a good overview of the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism.
Con:
• No brand-new research on the nature of fundamentalism
Description:
• Survey of the state of religious fundamentalism in the world
• Argues that the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism is key to our future
• Explains what sorts of commonalities exist among various fundamentalist movements
Book Review
It is arguable that the conflict between those seeking a secular ordering of human society and those who wish to impose an allegedly divine ordering of society is one of the most pressing and dangerous conflicts in the world today. Most societies seem to have people in the latter group and while they may all follow different religious traditions, they still share many things in common with one another.
How and why this is so is the subject of Laina Farhat-Holzman's book God's Law or Man's Law: The Fundamentalist Challenge to Secular Rule. A writer and historian who personally witnessed the Islamic takeover of her home country Iran, Farhat-Holzman has much more than a passing or scholarly interest in the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism.
At one time she hoped that increasing education and contact with different cultures would serve to limit the growth of fundamentalism, perhaps even inoculate people against its effects. Sadly, this hasn't turned out to be the case, and so she turned to study the phenomena in order to gain a better understanding of where it is coming from and why it is so attractive.
