paulinesavey

The best part of this book is the smallest part - Atran's atheistic religious anthropology. The second-best part is the next-smallest: his take on contemporary Islamic sociology. Unfortunately the most tedious parts are also the longest: his travelogues and complex narratives of the birthing of terrorist cells. The book would have been much better with some good editing - it could have been a third shorter, especially since he repeated whole passages almost verbatim in various places - I suspect this book is composed of many separate pieces he wrote, in which he used some of the same passages, and neither he nor his editor caught the redundancies in the book manuscript. Still, I find his bottom-line argument compelling: most Islamist terrorism is poorly-planned, fly-by-night lucky coincidences of boyhood commraderie plus delusions of cosmic grandeur. And I would like to read Atran's more scholarly book on religious anthropology.

2022-10-21 05:32