The Shared Well: A Concise Guide to Relations Between Islam and the West - Hardcover

Van De Weyer, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574885642 ISBN 13: 9781574885644

Publisher: Brassey's Inc, 2002

Synopsis

In The Shared Well, Robert Van de Weyer identifies the ancient dangers of dogma, arrogance, and inflexible convictions common to all faiths and nations as among the primary causes of this unnecessary religious and political strife. He also cites chronic world poverty caused by unregulated global markets and insatiable materialism. Hopeful about the future, Van de Weyer describes many ways in which the more than three billion people of the Islamic and Western worlds can unite to build a more prosperous and harmonious global community. With clear and profound insights into history, religion and economics, The Shared Well is an ideal primer for any reader eager to comprehend the past and build a better future.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Van de Weyer lectured in political economy at Cambridge and Anglia Universities for twenty years.

Reviews

Van de Weyer is a clergyman, and the strength of his book lies in its rehearsal of Islamic-Western relations and its analysis of capitalist globalism, a phenomenon he dates from the eighteenth-century launching of European commercial empires. Van de Weyer saliently recognizes the role of shame, as well as the more frequently noted one of moral outrage, in Islamic reaction to economic imperialism. But the religious underpinning of his prescription (reducible to democracy and freedom of conscience) for resolving Islamic-Western strife may strike many as inadequate and even nihilistic. He suggests that the ideal symbol for a "free and open religion" of peace is "the figure 0," standing for "no beliefs." Still, his brief is a good historical-economical supplement to Roger Scruton's immensely cogent and persuasive The West and the Rest. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Brassey's Inc
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574885642
• ISBN 13: 9781574885644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160