From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, an informative portrait of the God of Islam, the world's second largest, fastest-growing, and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion.
Itis a highly readable, unbiasedly comparative and elegantly insightful study of the Quran ... Through...scriptural comparisons, Miles gets to the core of the Abrahamic matrix: The monotheism that the Jewish people developed over the centuries was inherited by Islam and was turned into a global creed ... In observing such nuances, Miles, a Christian, is as objective, fair and gracious as one can get.
[Miles takes] a novel and rather startling approach to scripture, but in Mr. Miles’s hands it allows a kind of openness to a text that, to non-Muslim readers, can seem puzzling and alien ... Mr. Miles’s account stands alone, both in its generous openness of mind and in its scrupulous yet lively scholarship ... In his treatment of the Allah of the Quran, suspension of disbelief is finely balanced by a generous suspension of his own personal beliefs, and his book is all the stronger for this equipoise.
...highly readable ... Miles’s work on God in the Qur’an is heavily mediated by his previous work on God in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. Thus, the Qur’an’s episodes and salient personalities are projected against the accounts of the earlier scriptures either to show similarities or significant differences, and at times to provide nuanced insights ... even a reader familiar with the Qur’an will gain a lot from Miles’s book. Readers of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels will no doubt find it illuminating ... Finally, Miles wonders whether the Qur’an is the 'Word of God.' He offers no straightforward answer, yet the last chapter of his book, where he raises this issue, makes for compelling reading. Here, scholarship on comparative religion, scripture, literary insights, and imagination are marshaled to jostle with the author’s personal experiences in a bid to make us understand how a scripture moves individuals. A reader journeying into God in the Qur’an, Miles concludes, has already 'helped in a small way to give the emergent hybrid civilization we so badly need a chance to take its first breath.' I cannot agree more.
