Book Review
"Latino Muslims: Our Journey to Islam"
2/5 stars
Book fails to live up to its potential; changing religions to be free of an unwanted self is the norm.
*****
This is not the book that it could have been, and was emphatically NOT worth the $25.91 that I paid -- not sure why all copies of this book are so expensive.

On the one hand, one can write a book about a single person's journey and give way too much detail; on the other, one can write a book like this that has 51 different stories (of ≈3 pages each) that are each desultory and not really that informative.

The best way to write this book probably would have been to strike a balance: choose  6-12 representative/instructive stories and devote 15-20 pages to each one.

Maybe the book could have been bookended with some statistics on Latino Muslims. (What percent male? What percent female? Average age? One country of origin more frequent than others? What percentage of prison converts? What was the most common reason for converting? What percentage of them are married to Arabs or Persians? Are there any Shias in the house?)

Also: Why not a single picture of any of the subjects?
******

Really, there's less here than meets the eye: there are lots of Hispanics in the United States, and they are remarkably keen on assimilation. Of course, just using statistical arguments - - some number then would be Muslim.

Also, many (most?) people that convert to Islam find it in prison--hence the portmanteau "Prislam."

Given the large number of Latinos in prison, is it any surprise that some of them would come out Muslim?

I see a number of general themes here:

1. It seems like every last person here had to re-envision what they thought Jesus was in Islam. (That comes up in almost every story).

2. Most of these guys are not Islamically well educated. (Believe it or not: for all of the sound and fury, neither are most Arabs nor Persians.) 

a. The Shadahah is something that it doesn't require a great deal to take. Just a witness or to (or not) and NO type of coursework or reading before this declaration of faith. (Even the Catholics have a little bit of catechism before they baptize people.)

For example: One subject in here made the declaration right after he had got finished smoking weed and drinking after a night out and walked into a mosque and decided to convert.

b. Subjects here keep talking about trying to make the materials available in Spanish instead of learning to read the Quran in Arabic.

3. This version of Islam is not like the Black version: some of these guys found out about Islam in prison, but the great majority did not. (It's a running joke that these black guys have to go to jail to find out that drugs and fathering children by everybody on the block is not the best idea. Nobody ever thought of that when they were free men on the outside.)

A lot of these people did have legal/social problems.

It's also not like the strict Middle Eastern version: it's enough for these reverts to still eat at their parents' house as long as they don't serve them any pork-- Never mind that the non-pork meat was haram, and was cooked on the same equipment that was used to cook pork.

4. Everyone wants to point out that Spanish has a significant influx of Arabic words from the Iberian conquest. (Not sure why; I don't want to reclaim lost French heritage because of old Norman French's influence on English)

OR Everyone wants to claim some distant Arab blood from the Muslim conquest of Spain (almost 40 generations ago),

5. Some people are involved in Chicano/Other Social Justice l movements in these stories, and most of them trade one religion for another.  More stories than I wanted to count about people passing through four or five religions before settling on Islam.

6. It seems like a disproportionate number of these people are Dominican (these are black Hispanic people who don't particularly like being seen as black), and becoming Muslim seems suspiciously like a way to be rid of an unwanted (black!) self.

7. Lots of lapsed/orthopractic Catholics here. Also lots of lapsed Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses. Lots of people from huge families where they got lost in the shuffle--as you can do when you have 10 brothers and sisters.

8. One thing that is VERY Latin American about all these stories is the filthy excess of emotion..... It seems like tears are just streaming down faces every third page at reading a *single* line of Quran.

9. Lots of mixed marriages in here, where the Muslim partner eventually turned out the non-Muslim partner. (There's no problem to contract a marriage with either Jews or Christians in the Islamic conceptual space.)

10. Everybody here has drunk the "reversion" Kool-Aid: apparently all people are Muslims and when they change from one religion to another, they are just "reverting" back to what they have always been. Moses the prophet was a Muslim something like 2,100 years before Muhammad was even born.

******

I have some questions about the accuracy of this book. 

1. 8% of the words in Spanish are of Arabic origin, not 25% like they repeat in this book. 

2. Page 111,  Story # 24, they interviewed a man named Julio Pino.

I happen to have met this guy personally (because Kent State University is my alma mater), and it wasn't quite the way portrayed in this book:  

First is that not only was Pino NOT an agnostic, he was the faculty advisor for the Campus Atheists Student Group. I remember very clearly that he said at a debate that the "number one reason [he] was an atheist to that day was because you cannot rely on the accuracy of historical witnesses." (Of course, he went through two or three other religions I guess before he decided on Islam.)

Second is that he went to prison for lying to the FBI and even the Washington Post couldn't find a way to talk it away. (I guess if you go on record a few times too many shouting "Death to Israel" or making Elders-of-Zion type statements, it will get you on somebody's radar.)

Third is that: the number of the things that Pino said /taught were just false. (p.114): "Islam is the most democratic and egalitarian of all the world's religions because it recognized no distinction based on race, social class, nationality or gender." Sorry, but Arabs don't like black people and the mosques of blacks and Arabs (and for that matter Indo-Pakistanis) in the Detroit area are very separate things, and you will NEVER see a black guy with an Arab woman on his arm. Nor will you ever see black people employed in any of these Arab restaurants.

Egalitarian? Has he paid any attention to the economic conditions of many of the Gulf States?

3. If you did not know that Muslims are dozens of times over represented in US terrorist attacks, you would not find it from this book.
*******

What moved me to buy this book is that: I happen to live near Dearborn Michigan, and that place is crawling with Arab-Muslims.

I think it's the highest fraction of that pestilence of any city in the United States.

I've read a number of books on Islam, and every time I chat with one of these Arabs and ask them even things that are so basic that everybody should know (that I have read from these books), it seems like nobody knows.

I thought that maybe I would get a portrait of some more knowledgeable, thoughtful and introspective people in this book.

I only got a very little bit of what I came for.

Verdict: recommended only at the price of $5.

New concepts:

Five Percenters
Nuwaubian Nation
Zulu Nation