Islam: What the West Needs to Know

If you want to have your worst fears about Islam confirmed, the controversial Islam: What the West Needs to Know fills the bill, as five writers—an American, two Egyptian-born expatriates, one Serbian-born journalist, and a self-professed Palestinian ex-terrorist—assiduously contest the notion so often expressed by Western political leaders that Islam is basically a religion of peace which a few fanatics have highjacked to further their misguided goals. In reality, the quintet argue, Islam is a faith that mandates intolerance and jihad against unbelievers, and protestations to the contrary are either aberrations or deliberate and deceitful misrepresentations. Combining talking-head excerpts from monologues by the five speakers, supplemented by illustrative texts from the Koran and other Islamic religious works (including early biographies of Muhammad), artwork, maps, and archival footage from Western and Middle Eastern television broadcasts, the film affects an attitude of sober, detached inquiry, but it's basically a polemic that dismisses any notion of moderate Islam as fantasy and portrays the faith as inherently violent and expansionist—a religion that the non-Islamic world (the West in particular) must accept as incapable of compromise or adaptation and, therefore, consider an implacable foe. This is not only a simplistic view that paints Islam in unduly monolithic terms, but also an inflammatory one that seems to have no purpose other than to agitate in favor of a cultural clash that could only lead to two outcomes: either total victory for one side or permanent hostility between the two. Not recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)