Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith

While many in the Western media have depicted Islam with broad strokes to the point of caricature, Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, reminds readers that it is unfair to generalize so wantonly about a religion that encompasses more than a billion people. This book is brief, but its scope is ambitious: Gregorian surveys 1,400 years of Islamic history, including such key modern events as the 1978 Iranian revolution and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Naturally, some nuance is lost with this kind of dizzying breadth, but Gregorian competently presses home the point that Islam is a tremendously diverse religion that has changed considerably throughout its history. A final chapter explores the need for knowledge and understanding about Islam, which some have labeled""the green menace"" that has replaced""the red menace"" of the Cold War.