The Rage and the Pride by Oriana Fallaci
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(Hardcover)
- Pub. Date: August 2002
- 168pp
- Sales Rank: 97,689
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: August 2002
- Publisher: Random House Inc
- Format: Hardcover, 168pp
- Sales Rank: 97,689
- ISBN-13: 9780847825042
- ISBN: 0847825043
Synopsis
Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct. With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us.
Publishers Weekly
Noted Italian journalist Fallaci (Interview with History; etc.) is capable of hard-hitting, trenchant social criticism, but she fails to accomplish that in this impassioned but sloppy post-September 11 critique, which has been a bestseller in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Fallaci only aggravates her lack of rigorous thinking by translating the work herself, resulting in a clumsy text that appears not to have been edited or proofread by a fluent English speaker. (Whatever resonance "cicada"-her choice term for the "so-called intellectuals" whom she addresses-has in Italian fails to translate into English.) After a melodramatic preface in which Fallaci congratulates herself on her courage in speaking the truth (and in her defense, apparently there have been efforts to ban the book in France), she lights into the European, and especially Italian, "cicadas" who felt that, on September 11, 2001, America got what she had coming to her and who, in the name of political correctness, fail to condemn the "Reverse Crusade" being waged by Islamic zealots like Osama bin Laden. But Fallaci's love for America, her adopted home, and her critique of European intellectuals' perverse contempt for it, is laced with a bile that may lead readers to suspect her of anti-Arab bias-a possibility she is all to aware of, repeatedly defending herself against the charge of racism. Fallaci's "Italy for Italians" diatribe, her ugly portrait of Muslim immigrants as invading and violating her native Florence ("Terrorists, thieves, rapists. Ex-convicts, prostitutes, beggars. Drug-dealers, contagiously ill"), her denial that there is a moderate Islam, will not sit well with American readers, who may wonder why this small book has, in the publisher's words, "caused a turmoil never registered in decades" in Italy, France and Spain. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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Rage and the Prideby Anonymous
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December 04, 2005: No, I am not mystified by 'her denial that there is a moderate Islam, will not sit well with American readers', it sits very well with me! And I know exactly what a cicada sounds like and am familiar with its incessant self absorbed chirping.
Rage and the Prideby Anonymous
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March 14, 2003: I was raised in a spiritual tradition thousands of years older than islam in a land that suffered grievously from the murder, rape, pillage, forced conversion on pain of death, desecration, subjugation, and humiliation that its adherents visited upon my people in its name, justified in the knowledge that they were but carrying out the will of allah. They showed no mercy. They destroyed holy places and built their mosques on the ravished sites, preserving within a fragment or two of the original structure as a gesture of interfaith understanding to the infidel, just as they did with the Al Aqsa mosque on the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. / My first reaction on starting to read Oriana Fallaci's 'The Rage and the Pride' was a delight that curled my toes, that finally a writer of some substance got it and was not afraid to say it despite the boringly predictable death threats and attempts to murder that would follow by thugs who knew their god to be remarkably thin-skinned and not quite up to defending herself. I find it hard to argue with many of Fallaci's contentions, such as islam?s being the only major faith with absolutely no record of critical self-examination. It certainly has a record of dishing it out in spades while remaining utterly incapable of taking it. What other religion prescribes that apostates be killed, and that infidels be forced to pay higher taxes even as they count as only half a person (if male, zero if female) in litigation? / Fallaci's work was a cathartic outpouring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. True, there was dancing in the streets of Arab cities as well as expressions of sympathy, and many voiced outrage that the misguided perpetrators had in fact insulted their religion in an atrocious way. Yet neither the outrage nor the insult could have cut too deeply as not one teeny tiny fatwah came of it from anywhere in the islamic world calling for the head of bin Laden, not even a call for a slap on his wrist with a damp grape leaf. No, but the head of the Italian muslim community did call for the killing of this cancer-stricken septuagenarian woman, from his lair a scant mile from the Vatican, for the crime of speaking her mind. Yes, many did protest that muslims were unfairly tagged with a propensity for supporting terrorism. The people of Tibet have suffered horrendously from the cruel, illegal and immoral occupation by Chinese communists, but the Dalai Lama has yet to mobilize squadrons of Buddhist suicide bombers / After the first flush of empathetic anger and vicarious satisfaction, I began to think, began to see connections and lessons from history, began to distance myself from Fallaci's all-too-easy-to-agree-with screed, and began to see it instead as at best unthinkingly hypocritical. Her book is one unbroken polemic against islamic contamination of European Christendom. Her work is so excruciatingly chauvinistic that she is totally blind to how her beloved establishment came to be, how the world has seen all this happen in many ways before, and how it will doubtless see it happen again in many more ways. Colonialism and hegemony by force or stealth come in many flavors, religious or linguistic, ethnic or cultural, political or economic. But the planet's still here. This angry work serves only to further rouse those who already agree with Fallaci, enrage those who disagree, and leave a bad taste in everyone else?s mouth. / Remember Spenser's Faerie Queene? This...
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