'Muslim Mechanics' by Charles H. Brewton tries to give an account of the complex ins and outs of Islam from the origins to the present day. This is done through both careful research and comparison to Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism.

The beginning of the book really held me interest as Brewton explains terms that I hear about but have never really understood. However, later on the author really runs out of steam on this vein and moves onto other, less clear cut, topics. By the time we get to later chapters - such as the potential growth matrix of different religions and 'questions to ask a Muslim candidate for political office' - I felt as though we were going from factual information to fearmongering.

If Brewton had kept to 'this is what orthodox Muslims believe' or 'these are the origins of the faith' that would be a very interesting book but the later chapters make me question how impersonal those first chapters are.

Thank you to NetGalley for my ARC.

This book is poorly written, and Brewton lacks the subject matter expertise to write about Islam or any other religion.

The writing is disjointed and lacks logical organization and flow. Brewton frequently mentions facts that are irrelevant to the stated goal of understanding why Muslims do certain things. Those that should be relevant as frequently incorrect, such as claiming that the Christian Bible is more easily translatable than the Quran and that there is evidence for Moses and Abraham existing as literal historical people as they were portrayed in the Torah/Christian Bible.

The author also overgeneralizes Muslims, and completely fails to understand how recent the rise of widespread Muslim fundamentalism is or the forces behind it. Brewton claims to be objective, but is merely ignorant.

Al Quaeda think that only individuals can be deserving of death, whilst Isis thinks that entire civilisations can be (Kindle 30%). Taliban Afghanistan has its roots in the more rationalistic (Hanafi) traditions of Islam (41%).

The book is full of interesting facts like those, and its aim is to explain the ‘why’ of how modern Islam manifests in the world. In doing so, it is heavily tilted to an American readership, with multiple references to things like Thomas Jefferson’s version of the Quran. The book occasionally becomes overly detailed to the point of irrelevance. Did we really need to know about Hammurabi, who existed 2000 years before Islam (54%)? And why tell us the Latin roots of the word innovation, when surely it is the Arabic ‘bidah’ that is relevant (29%)?

Theologically the book sometimes veers into becoming too simplistic. We hear that the Christian bible contained 39 books in the Old Testament (9%). That is not true for the majority of Christianity (ie Catholic and Orthodox). We heard that Islam cannot undergo a reformation because it rejects innovation (29%). Yet change does occur. For example Al Wahhab (d.1792) directed islam back to Scripture away from Tradition. Change within a doctrine of no-change needed explaining.

The chapters on Scripture and its interpretation didn’t seem to acknowledge the ways that textual and form criticism can impact upon a Scripture. Yes Mainstream Islam rejects it, but there are still questions beginning to be raised about the possibility of Quranic variants (eg the Sana manuscript), and episodes in the Quran which can be found in pre-existing literature (eg the story of the Seven Sleepers). There is a small, but growing ‘liberal’ Islam which has similarities to Liberal Protestantism and Liberal Judaism, but the book made no mention of that movement.

The chapters on finance and business structures were well written as they drew upon the authors professional business experience. But they were a little theologically simplistic. Did the Church really redefine Usury to mean ‘excessive interest’ around the year 1600 (55%)? Or had the very meaning of profit and loss changed? The medieval church never banned banks from covering the costs of lending (eg to pay staff, etc). But when investment banking made the holding of money turn into a potential loss, that became just another cost to be covered, by ‘interest.’

The Quranic verses on money lending refer to the wrongness of charging interest, and they do so in the context of references to doubling and quadrupling the amount loaned. That sounds similar to the ban on profiteering like Christianity’s condemnation of Usury. So an interesting question (which the book does not press) is whether Christianity and Islam were actually making the same doctrinal point, even though their practices eventually diverged?

A less appealing feature of the book is that there was sometimes a negative tone about Islam. We hear that hadith have been ‘forged’ (19%) and that ‘Muslim scholars are... often confused (about)… their religious duty’ (16%) because of divergent hadith. Yes different Muslims can reach different conclusions about issues such as Music, and the use of alcohol gel vs covid. But that doesn’t make them “confused.” Christians take different views about divorce. Are Christians therefore ‘confused’?

Towards the end of the book readers are urged on the desirability of checking the “true American patriotism” (63%) of Muslims who run for public office. This is because Muslims can lie in order to get power and then impose aspects of Islam. Exactly the same comments were made about subversive Catholics when JFK ran for office. Those comments are now recognised for the bigoted prejudice and bias that they were. This whole section of the book is distasteful to the point of being Islamophobic. In a democracy, elected officials are judged by their voters: not by tests of patriotism. Isn’t that a learning point from the 1950s Communist witch hunts?

Overall, this is a book with potential, but it needs editing to sharpen its relevance. Its needs theological expertise to nuance its analysis. And it needs the removal of unjustified negative comments about Islam and Muslims.

These are honest comments on an Advanced Review Copy (ARC) of the book.

Dr. Brewton provides a valuable and comprehensive understanding of the keys to Islam. His focus is on Sharia law and its implications for Muslim countries and maybe for Western countries with significant Muslim populations. His best chapters on that law, Sharia finance and the religion’s relationship with democratic principles. Having studied some of the Qur’an and its history and some of the sectarian battles, I kept waiting for the author to cover some of the controversies—such as why internecine fighting will occur first if a true Holy War ever breaks out (one Druze adherent told me that their sect would be the first attacked by everyone else). The “brotherhood” of Islam is not as strong as it appears from the outside. He does get to all of the controversies by the penultimate chapter.

The strong tie between politics and religion is not explicit here but is well demonstrated when it shows how Muslim countries are using Islamic law for many issues and adapted more globally accepted legal systems for international relations, business and so on. Only in America do we really try to keep politics and religion separate. Many in the world today are aware of other countries’ struggles with politics and religion melding leading to internal polarizations—think Ireland and its long struggles between loyalty to England and separatism and Catholicism or Protestantism. In the first part of the book, the more militant adherents of Islam are mostly discussed (ISIS, Taliban, et al.); it’s not until the second half of the book do we see more discussion of the cultural Muslim practices, Qur’anic or orthodox practices in comparison with what we would call Islamists and jihadists. Another scholar—an Arab Christian—has said that three aspects separate these main bodies of believers in Islam: the definition of jihad, what it means to be separate from the world and what it means to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet.

The author’s tone in the beginning seemed fearful and protective of “American exceptionalism.” This moderates in the second half as he realizes that the American system is more robust to withstand any religion’s usurpation of judicial and legislative power. He also opines on the growth of democracy and capitalism under Christianity, but wouldn’t under Sharia law, and how those have benefited the world. However, this is not the purpose of the book: to assuage our fears. The purpose is the help us understand the “mechanics” behind the Islamic faith.

The author succeeds at this but there are many distractions along the way. In the first few chapters, Brewton follows a rabbit trail with Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an and his study of the faith, and how many new Congressional members used it to be sworn in. This lengthy discussion doesn’t help us understand the Muslim Mechanics. Nor did an inordinately long rendition of Dr. Bart Ehrman’s critique of New Testament manuscript studies. Ehrman has been refuted by other scholars and only one paragraph is given to that perspective. Likewise, Brewton covers The Gospel of Barnabas and its contradictory “evidence” of Jesus escaping death on the cross. He states that reprints of this “gospel” are very popular in the Muslim world. He does not show that Muslim scholars have recognized the gospel as fraudulent; it’s full of historical, geographical and linguistic inaccuracies. Additionally, there’s no mention that this gospel appears in Spain and Italy in the 16th century just before the Moors are expelled from Spain and the Spanish Inquisition reaches its pinnacle of influence as it starts to combat heresies—including Protestantism and other reformation movements. Strangely, though interesting, he analyzes Christianity and Islam from some business model perspectives that don’t illuminate any of the mechanics; they merely lead into his prognostication for Islam.

Brewton devotes a chapter to several issues, like homosexuality and honor killings. Why he chose these particular issues is not clear, nor do they really add to the discussion of understanding why Muslims behave this way.
I found one serious gap or faulty presumption on the part of the author. He seems to only have approached Islam (and Christianity) from a Western/European paradigm of righteousness, which is mostly legalistic. We tend to spend most of our time talking about guilt and making amends or atonement. Middle Eastern cultures, including Israel’s Judaism and therefore Christianity’s roots, deal mostly with honor and shame. Even Greek scriptures (New Testament) shows this wherein our righteousness is not altered by sinful acts. “Therefore, there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus” because our sinful acts do not impute shame. We are redeemed and valued and honored through Christ, by Christ. Our corrupt (shameful) selves are changed, born anew, transformed through His saving grace and mercy. If not, no amount of good deeds can atone for the corruption in our soul (greed, envy, divisiveness, etc.). Brewton ignores just how infused all monotheistic religions are with honor and shame and fails to understand how honor killings are a rational outcome from this perspective. Shame brought on the umma (family, community, faith) is punishable in all three religions and many cultural systems (e.g. southern US families, military combat groups, and so on). We can better understand Muslim Mechanics when we can empathize with how important honor to the umma is.

Like the lack of analysis of the cultural, political and religious context surrounding the Gospel of Barnabas, the author mentions a “golden age” in Spain when Islam, Judaism and Christianity collaborated and thrived together under Islamic rule. He fails to mention that this was also a period when the Classical Greek philosophers were being discovered by key theologians of the three monotheistic religions. The main Greek philosophy these theologians adopted is that the spiritual realm is good and immune from strong evil influences while the physical realm is “bad” and drags us away a relationship with God. This tainted all three religions and transformed how they viewed their faith’s truths. This is especially important given the importance of the four schools of Islamic law and when they came to prominence and which ones prevail today. Brewton does spend time on abrogation—the supersession of some scriptures by later ones—agreeing that those scholars desiring this will prevail, which would lead Islam to become more militant, just as it’s led many Christian leaders to ignore Hebrew scripture (Old Testament) dicta in favor of the more broad, abstract, principled but less accountable teachings of Christ.

I have also heard Muslim teaching that Caliphs were also qualified because they never sinned. Thus some of the spiritual forefathers revered by all three Abrahamic religions have different stories in the Qur’an. Adam and Eve may have sinned and been forgiven. Noah never got drunk and naked in the Qur’an. Abraham didn’t sin either. His foibles in Genesis—e.g. lying twice about his relationship with Sarah—are not mentioned. David was warned before having an adulterous affair with Bathsheba in the Qur’an while the Hebrew Scriptures have a fallen David restored. Some of these differences between the Bible and the Qur’an are not discussed.

There is one erratum with Graph 3 on pg. 194 and Graph 4 on pg. 198: the vertical axis is labeled billions which would put the world’s population at 7 trillion.