@article{1555606,
      recid = {1555606},
      author = {Strenski, Ivan.},
      title = {Muslims, Islams and Occidental Anxieties : Conversations  about Islamophobia.},
      pages = {1 online resource (290 pages).},
      abstract = {Muslims, Islams and Occidental Anxieties deconstructs our  common prejudices about both the compatibility and  incompatibility of Muslim and Western civilizations. Rather  than reinforcing the well-meant, but misinformed, opinion  that the religions all fundamentally teach identical  values, we identify what seem different distinctive Muslim  "goods." Rather than offering the facile moral choice  between an Islam either "all good" or "all bad," we argue  the case for pluralism derived from Sir Isaiah Berlin. In  many cases, Islam thus represents a distinctive system of  alternative ethical and religious "goods" to those valued  in the West. In other cases, differences will remain  different and unresolved. Far from necessarily threatening  Western moral and religious identity, we explore how the  alternative "goods" Islam offers the West can enrich our  notions of what constitutes "the good," even to the extent  of reviving or enlivening certain Western religious  practices. Along with instructional guidelines for  classroom use, the book in informed by the powerful and  intellectually rigorous device of investigative, empathetic  "dialogue" or "conversation," as articulated by MIT's  Sherry Turkle and Oxford's Theodore Zeldin, respectively.  This form of dialogue steers clear of the didactic mode and  instead recovers the open models of philosophical dialogues  pioneered by Plato, Socrates, and the "tolerant"  Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus and Jean Bodin.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1555606},
}