Apostate: From Christianity to Islam in times of secularisation and terror

I'm afraid this review will carry more the character of personal thoughts and reflections on the book than an appraisal or a critique of it. Always when one reads a book which may be termed “good” one cannot, in speaking of it, well enough subdue the enthusiasm that it inspired as to be able to refrain from much incidental digression. I have said in the title of this review that “Apostate” would prove to be highly interesting to those studying Theology, especially of the Abrahamic faiths, be this study from personal or academic inclination. But that’s doing too little justice to the vastly more comprehensive interest of the book. Sociologists, Historians (I think of all epochs), Politicians and students of Politics, even Classicists will find in Joram van Klaveren's "Apostate" substantial matter to engage their interests. Specifically, atheists and researchers on Atheism cannot afford to pass on the book: it is a challenge thrust into their hands to which a personal, though really an internal, response is due.From the rather controversial title of it, Muslims who've heard nothing whatsoever of the book or its author will probably regard it with a defensive or resentful eye and say to themselves: "Dear me! Here's another one of those Islam-defaming books about how somebody supposedly had suffered under ‘Islamic tyranny’! I wonder what Western government or news company is supporting him to speak ill of us!". Non-Muslims on the other hand, in like cluelessness about the content or purport of the work, might, judging from its title, think: "Aha, can't say that I'm surprised! Lucky man to be alive to tell his story though, seeing how the Shari’ah deals with apostates! I wonder what Western government is giving him protection!”. Both these lines of thought are incorrect and couldn't be more so. Joram van Klaveren’s “Apostate” is no propagandist work either for or against Islam: it tells of an unforeseen personal quest as conscientiously followed as it was sincerely felt. In reading the author’s account you will find, I trust, a fund of pleasure, knowledge, and surprise. Until 2 or 3 years ago Mr Van Klaveren was a vehement and most determined denunciator of Islam in the Dutch Parliament, of which he was a member. I daresay there are a good many Europeans who have no special liking for the Muslims, but few even among this number would go so far in their condemnation of the religion and its adherents as did Joram van Klaveren. His antagonism amounted to a passion. He saw Islam as a dark, backward, democratically hostile, violent, entirely objectionable force; and his Great Political Ambition was to wipe Islam in all its expressions completely from the face of the Netherlands. Recognising that such an enterprise would require method, necessary to which would be a strong foundation and structure of Reason to support and back it up, he formed the design of writing a book that is to serve as a formal reference detailing, with factual evidence, all the "evils" that Islam, to his thinking, stood for and was rife with. And that was how Mr Joram van Klaveren began upon a book which, through a surprising turn of events however, ended up being that about which you are now reading.The work is formed of 12 Chapters with pithy titles and vigorous content outlines; a short preface; a confidential Epilogue; a most resourceful Bibliography; and two excellent Forewords, one each by the internationally renowned and much-loved scholars Shaykh Hamza Yusuf (of Zaytuna College, California) and Professor Abdal Hakim Murad (of Cambridge University). Indeed, these well honoured names on the cover made the book (which I was already strongly inclined to purchase) quite irresistible. I've listened to the talks and lectures of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf for years. There is so much soul in his words. My brother just loves him. He (Shaykh Hamza Yusuf that is–though I daresay my brother too is alright in his own way) is so graceful and so gentle, and has about him an air of such perfect internal serenity and elegant stoicism that one finds quite magnetizing. There are dozens of his lectures on YouTube that I would ask the reader to watch. Professor Abdul Hakim Murad is better known among academic circles, but his name was familiar to me from my teens, and it always commanded a reverence most profound. God reward them both for their thoughtful Forewords.The author begins with an intellectual and theological exploration of the idea of a Supreme Being—God. We that grew up in Islam from infancy are strangers to the feeling of confusion or dissatisfaction or probably even frustration, of which we hear so much, arising from a non-agreement between what one is being taught about God and what one, from a sort of seventh sense, imagines that God rather ought to be like. Islam's emphatic proclamation of One God, Who is Absolute in His Being, and Sole in His Dominion, is, from it's downright simplicity, natural and reasonable. And even appealing. I've always felt a special esteem for Unitarian Christianity (which was also the Christianity that the inimitable Charles Dickens believed in) and delighted in its closeness to Islam's uncompromising monotheism. As to the prophets, the dispute centers upon three: Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon them all). The Jews declare that they will recognize only up to Moses, and none after him. The Christians will recognise all the prophets up to and including Jesus, but none after him. And the Muslims, in their turn, embrace all the three: Moses (peace be upon him) of the Jews; Jesus (peace be upon him) of the Christians; and Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) of the whole world, who preached the same message of submission to God as did Moses and Jesus to their respective communities before in the course of time many man-made alterations were introduced and their original teachings became alloyed. This question, whether Biblical sources or Christian doctrine itself had historically been tampered with by the will of Man, was one that the author was particularly anxious to get to the bottom of. He dug up ancient records, looked up the findings of modern research, and searched divers other sources. The work is referenced with the best and most authoritative material. One must commend the author’s unbiased strength of judgement and strict honesty. I found much to surprise me in “Apostate”.Parts of the book read engrossingly like a fantasy (see discussion on the pre-mortal state, page 60) and other parts there are where one feels sentimental. Of the latter I give example of the passage in which the author wrote of the book "Hayy bin Yaqzam" (by the 12th century Arab Ibn Tufayl) as "one of the most intriguing works I came across during my personal research". This lively bit of panegyric for so foreign an object made me suddenly sentimental. A strong sense took gentle hold of my thoughts, of Learning being as a magical journey to fairylands of undreamed-of beauty, far, faraway, where one roams in a happy childhood, encountering the friendly creatures Enchantment, Wonder, Fascination, and..Intrigue—as did Joram van Klaveren with "Hayy bin Yaqzam". And I think that these “fairy encounters” often prove so powerful as to turn completely the current of one's life or one’s habitual line of thought. I paused in my reading to reflect. It began to be apparent to me that indeed the more a person learns, the more expansive the universe becomes for him; and the more magical encounters and experiences enrich his life. It makes a dreamer of one, and I do think that all the Great Scientists and Artists that the world has known were dreamers, because genius is such an out-of-the-world thing that it can be born only in dreams. I feel the verity of this very deeply indeed.In common justice to Mr Van Klaveren the reader must not suppose him to have set out to write a book that was friendly to Islam. Any such thought or insinuation is a wrong done him. No person can be more amazed than he at the preposterous turn that events took. I see his case simply as having proved to be a Rubin's Vase: he began with the design of painting two pitch-black faces confronting each other (signifying “Islamic intolerance”, I imagine) on a white background (Europe and the Netherlands?)—and ended up with a beautiful white vase (Islam) sitting on a black background (the vicious actions of an evil minority of "muslims"). No amount of skepticism or suspicion cast upon himself or the book would tint the transparent integrity of Mr Van Klaveren’s proceedings in the years that it took “Apostate” to develop; nor can any just mind consciously underrate the nobleness of his courage in doing as he did. And this it is—his not "hushing it up” and "supressing" those very unexpected (and, if I have any understanding of human nature, for him even mortifying) findings—his not sweeping them under the carpet with sly hands and placing a sofa on top of the guilty spot and sitting square upon it and acting just as if there's nothing underneath: I say this sterling integrity it is that merits for him the applause and admiration of all virtuous souls. For, I daresay a good many of us when seeking information really only "shop" for it—looking where our cherished notions will be confirmed, and wilfully being blind to everything else—choosing to believe or ignore or indeed flat out deny this or that bit of information quite arbitrarily, accordingly as we please.At the time of the earliest Christians no such peoples as Jehovah's Witnesses or Quakers or even Protestants and Roman Catholics were ever heard of. Neither is it to be imagined that the splits that created these factions came about amicably or even peaceably. Is not it a truism that any one group or party of human beings will eventually, sooner or later, differ; and perhaps even split? Love marriages themselves are not exempt from this fate. Nor is it unusual when these broken off pieces form opposition parties to defy the whole. The phenomenon is perhaps more a consequence of human individuality than human iniquity. It is only to be lamented that some persons’ individuality is actually all iniquity—iniquity, haply, of a most wicked order. Islam has not the monopoly of such dangerous outliers. Neither practicing the truth nor caring a two-pence for it, these wretches never hesitate to profess affiliation with unoffending faiths or communities whom they cannot represent and who utterly reject them. Just so it is that Muslims repudiate any relationship with, say, Boko Haram, and all the rest of the poisonous species. What ordinary Christian wouldn’t be grieved and chagrined to find himself being confounded with Ku Klux Klan members, and all their damnable beliefs and practices attributed to him? These things, I dare say, need not be so very hard to grasp; and they form part of a constructive discourse in Mr Van Klaveren's book.“Apostate” is a book that I deem as powerful in the promise that it holds to foster mutual understanding and promote charitable regard between Islam and the West. I hope that the reader will not infer that I mean by this distinction to imply any dichotomy between the two. And in my use of the word “powerful” to express my opinion of the book, I speak deliberately and not in loose terms. Those will not think that I exaggerate who are properly cognizant of the critical importance of harmonious co-existence between communities and nations as between individuals; and who witness increasingly the paradoxical difficulty of attaining this desirable state in our inter-connected, inter-dependent, nomadic, but at the same time polarised, terrorized, and rashly judgemental 21st Century. My earnestness on this point is so great I hardly know the ins and outs of my own sentence (which is ponderous indeed!), but I wished simply to explain my appreciation of what I feel in our times to be the uniting potentiality of such a book as Mr Van Klaveren's "Apostate”: the book erects bridges of sympathy between the professors of the Abrahamic faiths. Muslims are fond of giving away copies of "A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam" to non-Muslims; I urge that it should henceforth be paired with Joram van Klaveren's "Apostate". After all, in our times it is Prejudice and Misinformation that are the Great Blinders and the Inciters to intolerance. And because at one point (and not a very distant one either) Joram van Klaveren had held every conceivable unfavourable opinion of Islam and Muslims, his “Apostate” is better equipped to handle these Threats to the Peace than the book previously mentioned (though I make no doubt but it too is an excellent work, in its own way). Indeed, some of the charges that Joram van Klaveren’s book brought against me as a Muslim quite astounded me. I, for example, never was aware that I might be looked upon as especially anti-Semitic. The idea never crossed my thoughts because I never harboured any such dark feelings towards the Jewish people and certainly never thought it my duty as a Muslim to make myself disagreeable to anyone in particular. The Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of God upon him) never did such a thing nor would he have condoned it.I imagine it will be asked, perhaps with some concern, whether the non-Muslim reader, after having read "Apostate”, may reasonably be expected to follow suit in the example of its author and become Muslim? ‘Tis a difficult question to attempt answering. I’ve read the book carefully, every page, every word. It took me 8 hours to the very minute; and I rather think that it is impossible that any reader could feel or experience in any single 8 hours all that the author felt and experienced in the tens of hundreds of 8 hours of which “Apostate” was the end result. A complete, voluntary change of religious faith has hardly ever been seen to occur in so little a time as 8 hours. Even 8 days can scarcely contain such a Crisis. But let the book be, dear reader, a catalyst to your own, own, personal quest, as I’m sure that such it will prove for many. That books do change peoples’ lives there can be no question. Did not so commonplace a book as the dictionary change Malcolm X's life? But we may doubt whether Mr Van Klaveren would be Muslim today had he only read his book, and never underwent the process of researching and writing it. I think, however, that I may be right in conjecturing that the reading of just such a book as “Apostate” by a Joram van Klaveren in his undergraduate days may have led him elsewhere than to the anti-Islam PVV for a political career. And I make a bold that is bold indeed, to say of his embracing Islam, that at no point in the process did things take a turn that could fairly be described as quick or sudden. So much will be evident to the careful reader of “Apostate”. When or how his faith began slowly to emerge from the shadows and become conviction is simply an impossible question. Be it known, therefore, that the book makes a lot more of an intellectual appeal than an emotional one. In the Preface we are in fact told by the author that: "I certainly would not say that there have not been any emotions involved in my quest to find God; however, it was primarily an intellectual exercise."Although there were times, while reading the book, when I couldn’t refrain from picturing to myself, with much amusement, what must have been the author’s mortified countenance when in researching his intended “anti-Islam” book every worthy source he consulted controverted incontestably his severe opinions of Islam (as distinguished from “Muslims”), I always at the same time sympathised with the awkwardness of this his predicament and honoured the courage that enabled him to plod on. We who have never grappled with a Goliath that tried to crush our cherished notions can little think what a hard time of it Mr Van Klaveren must have had. Honesty demanded of him to conquer (at least temporarily) his repugnance of Islam and to read through and consider with pristine impartiality so much that was the opposite of what he should have liked to hear—after all, the plan was to write a book about how evil Islam was. It is hard enough for a man to be called upon to listen without a frown to a recital of the virtues of the very object of his particular aversion. But for Conscience to insist upon his joining in the recital—publicly?! What this must have cost the author of “Apostate”—what it must have cost his pride especially—is not summarily to be dismissed or discounted; and we can readily sympathise with the “enormous reluctance” (see page 170) that he owned he had at first felt for such a proceeding. One thus sees that there had been nothing dramatic. Mr Van Klaveren’s affinity to Islam grew by degrees so slow as hardly to be perceptible even to himself. For the people around him, religious sentiments aside, it must have been simply beautiful to behold. A phenomenon as smooth and gentle as the unfurling of flowers in the sunlight. Or the dawning in of daylight. He must have burnt gallons of midnight oil in long hours of reading, correspondence, and solitary reflection (we see a glimpse of the scene of his studies in the Epilogue). For me it is a marvel that so intense a loathing as his for Islam could ever possibly have been dissolved. But upon reflection the mystery soon resolves; for, a true, honest soul is never long in error: sooner or later Truth will loom before him, and when it does, though it were a giant porcupine or a thorny tree-trunk that had like to pierce his skin and bruise his ego, he will make himself embrace it. And then he finds that the contact brought no real pain after all, nor in fact inflicted any bruises at all. I pray God to strengthen us in our continual struggles with our meaner passions and to give us the upper hand of them, that in like stormy weather we may be enabled to act with like single-hearted uprightness as had Mr Klaveren in his own special Crisis.This review would ramble on did I not fear overtasking the reader’s indulgence. I will close therefore, with the following words: I have learned much from Joram van Klaveren's "Apostate" (never mind how trite that sounds: it is thoroughly meant), and it has not been without its chastening effect upon what I now perceive to be the less charitable part of my character. If some years ago I'd happened to see on the news (as indeed I may have done, and haply forgot) one of the many severely anti-Islam addresses made by Mr Van Klaveren in the Dutch Parliament, I'd instantly have shut my heart against him. And if I had heard his name I would have cast aspersions upon it. And if I had chanced to meet him I would have scowled at him very blackly indeed. And if I had had a book like "Apostate" I would not have deigned to give it him, because in my mind he would have been classed as being antagonistic beyond all earthly reclaim. I ruminate upon this likely course of conduct on my part with almost excruciating penitence; because in all this I would have wronged him, and it would have been shame on me indeed for, today, he is my brother. This will remain a lesson for me all my life to come—and how else, when I read these his words in the Epilogue: "Without having taken the path that I took, I would not be where I am today." And I ask (it needs no answer) if that was not truly spoken indeed.I recommend "Apostate" to you, reader, and to your friends and family too, in the highest, the warmest, the earnestest, terms.You will remember to add a copy or two of the book to your cart of course. For yourself—and for another.

good back if wanting to look at answers to contra islam

For muslims: you will be learning about your religion in a way you have never learnt before as it has sources and references that you will never find in a book written in a traditional way.For non muslims: you will find the most comprehensive answers to all your questions about Islam and what is happening in the world.

Amazing book Must read

Wonderful book only let down by poor translation from Dutch to English.

Good review but probably more for those already familiar with Abrahamic religion. The questions and accusations against Islam very well researched and explained

Fantastic! Must read!

This book is very interesting, and I want to keep reading it. It grabs the reader's attention which is good for seekers of truth.