Tom Facchine – Book Recommendation – Islam and The Problem of Black Suffering

			Yes, one of the better books that I've read recently is by Dr. Sherman Jackson,
		

			Islam and the problem of black suffering. And this is something I would recommend to every Muslim to
read. If you skew academic, you are kind of more into
		

			theory and theoretical books nonfiction. And I would definitely recommend this book for a couple of
reasons. One is that it gives you a nice bird's eye view of kind of the map of the schools of
thought regarding Islamic theology and theta. And I find that it does so in a very,
		

			in a very academic way, in a very sort of objective way. Right, a lot of times books about off data,
they get polemical, right. And so, from the intro, you know that this person is going to refute x,
or he's going to support X or etc. Right? He doesn't do that he takes one particular problem. And he
kind of takes you through the steps of how these different sorts of movements or schools would deal
with this problem. So he lays it all out in front of you. And you're able he shows instead of
telling, that's the nice thing, right, he's able to show you sort of the different ways that these
different schools or movements would interpret certain things,
		

			as opposed to telling you that this one's right and one's wrong.
		

			And I think that that has tremendous merit, right? Not everybody likes to be told what to believe.
That's just reality. Some people like to figure it out for themselves. And it's easier for them to
kind of see it worked out on paper. That being said, he has commitments, and he spells them out,
frankly, but it doesn't necessarily take away from the academic quality of his work. And actually,
he in the book is a really nice and robust defense of sort of
		

			the traditionalist school, the athletic School of our feet, or whatever we want to call it.
		

			He shows how rationality and reason is not just one thing, and that there's what he calls a regime
of sense that the companions had, that the early Muslims had before they were subject to external
influences, and sort of prefabricated categories of thought that then later theologians tried to
cram the Quran and the Sunnah into and try to make it fit. So it's not just somebody saying, well,
here's a, here's vanilla chocolate and pistachio ice cream and you just have your pick. He has a
commitment. He has a belief that, you know, one of these is more faithful to the tradition than the
others, but he is respectful of the reader enough to kind of like show instead of telling them to
		

			let you figure it out for yourself