Almost exactly one year ago, an article in PW stated: "Trade publishing has yet to comprehensively address the interests of Muslims in America." The headline? "Islamic Publishing Is Poised for Growth." Now publishers are crashing production schedules for new books and reprinting or updating old ones, booksellers are ordering everything about Islam they can get their hands on, and books dealing with that faith and with the Middle East are topping bestseller lists. The events of September 11 launched an accelerated-learning course, and books are at the heart of the new curriculum.
Yvonne Haddad, a much-published author and professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, has been very busy on the lecture circuit. "People are really eager to learn everything about Islam," she said. "They want to know who their neighbors are."
The Time Is Now
"I don't think I would have predicted this rush for information," said Cynthia Read, executive editor at Oxford University Press. "It is both surprising and very heartening."
Read is the longtime editor of John Esposito, a familiar face in the media these days as an expert on Islam and the Middle East. Esposito is director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and editor of the four-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995). When he's not on TV or at the university, Esposito is adding to his lengthy vita with a short book he's now authoring for Oxford to be called Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, with publication scheduled for spring 2002.
Esposito is only one of several authors from the press's substantial Islamic studies publishing program suddenly in demand; they also publish Haddad (The Muslims of America, 1993, and other titles) and Reuven Firestone (Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, 1999), among others. "All these books instantly disappeared," Read said. "We're printing everything as quickly as we can."
Given their general missions of providing authoritative information on scholarly or specialized topics, it's not surprising university presses have a head start with select, relevant and fresh backlist titles. At Yale University Press, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (Apr., paper) is on top of the national bestseller lists; Yale has shipped more than 200,000 copies. Before September 11, sales of both cloth and paper editions totaled 20,000.
Like Oxford, Yale has a number of authors in its stable who are suddenly in demand at bookstores and in the media. Foreign policy specialist Barnett Rubin is updating The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System for a paper edition. A book by Rashid on jihad is due out in February 2002. The production schedules are slightly accelerated, said Yale publishing director Tina C. Weiner. Demand that big is unprecedented in the normal course of university press business, Weiner said. "I would like to spend one day of my life not concerned about sell-through. But our information says sell-through is happening."
Sell-through is certainly occurring at the Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, a member-owned bookstore across the street from the University of Chicago that stocks more than 100,000 titles and carries the largest selection of university press books in the country. A second nearby outlet for the general reader, 57th Street Books, carries more than 55,000 titles, with some overlap in stock. Rashid's Taliban is one of at least 150 titles on Islam and the Middle East now selling at the two stores. General manager Jack Cella told PW, "People want to understand Islam and they want to know, why is the United States so disliked in so much of the Middle East?"
The neighborhood is a haven for world-class intellectuals and houses several seminaries as well. But the stores' clientele is not only a university crowd. "A very wide range of people are now coming in and asking for books," Cella said. And the sudden expansion of sales, even at stores generally doing good business with a deep and specialized range of titles on Islam, is still dramatic.
Look Under "Religion"
Scholarly authors with knowledge of Islam are not solely in the domain of university presses, however. Nor are such titles found only or primarily in the Middle East section of bookstores. Islam relates politics and religion in a way that seems unfamiliar to the secular West.
Haddad suggests that the influence of the Muslim religion in politics seems considerable to Americans simply because Islam itself is unfamiliar, whereas Americans are more accustomed to relationships between Christianity and politics. "Look at some of the ways evangelical Christians look at reality," said Haddad, who has two new books coming out early next year. "Feminism and African-American liberation came out of the church. We can accept this, but anything 'alien,' we expect them to shed their religion."
Books by Karen Armstrong were already selling well before September 11. Her Islam: A Short History (2000) was one of the inaugural titles in the Modern Library series for Random House. Already-healthy demand for the 187-page book "skyrocketed" after September 11, publicist Ericka Muncie said, sending it to a bestseller berth; 100,000 copies are now in print and they're not sitting long on shelves, booksellers attest. Another Armstrong title doing well is The Battle for God (Ballantine, Jan.). "Everything by her is just flying off the shelf," said Kim Tano, buyer for spirituality books at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Ore. That's also true in Denver, where Armstrong titles are moving briskly at the Tattered Cover.
A key text in unprecedented demand is the Koran, which is available in a variety of editions and translations, some of them parallel Arabic-English texts. Jim Ramsour, buyer at Tattered Cover for traditional religions, said he's almost out of four different editions of the Koran, a "first time for that." "We recommend a parallel text," said Tano at Powell's, which has eight different versions of the Islamic scriptures.
Chicago-based Kazi Publications, the oldest and largest Muslim publisher and distributor of books on Islam in North America, stocks dozens of versions of the Koran and commentaries among its 2,000 specialty titles on Islam. The translation most in demand now is a parallel-text paperback edition, The Glorious Koran translated by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, an early 20th-century version by an Englishman who converted to Islam. Another popular translation comes from Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an early 20th-century Indian scholar of the Koran.
Kazi titles lean toward the classic rather than the more ephemeral titles produced by journalists and policy analysts. "For us it's very difficult to carry them," said Laleh Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who is herself a published author on Islam and women and Islamic law and who is also production manager for Kazi. "The world changes so quickly." So the distributor is now meeting demand for such titles as A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1994), a George Washington University professor and internationally recognized expert on Islam and its mystical branch, Sufism. Bakhtiar's own Encyclopedia of Islamic Law: A Compendium of the Major Schools (1996), which deals with historic Islamic jurisprudence, is also attracting new interest and orders.
Shopping Online
Katherine Koberg, religion and spirituality editor at Amazon.com, said prior to September 11, not one of the top 1,000 religion books on Amazon dealt with Islam. That grouping of titles now includes perhaps a dozen Korans and commentaries and another 30 or so titles dealing with Islam. Of the top 10 titles in religion, four deal in part or entirely with Islam. "We're seeing a lot of people just wanting to get up to speed on Islam," Koberg stated.
Amazon's bestselling Koran is the translation by N.J. Dawood (PenguinUSA, 2000, 7th revised edition). Koberg has also noted increased sales of books dealing with comparative religions, including Huston Smith's classic The World's Religions and Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God and A History of God. "People are looking for a whole overview," Koberg said.
In reviewing sales of titles at Amazon, it's reasonably clear that some books have gotten scooped up because of their titles, which is one way that customers can browse Amazon's stock online. " 'Taliban' is a definite key word," Koberg noted.
Who Has the Edge?
In the hunt for anything and everything relevant, some specialty publishers have also had an edge. Transnational Publishers, a specialist in international law and human rights publishing in Ardsley, N.Y., is busy selling copies of (and foreign rights for) Usama bin Laden's Al-Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network by Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetnam (Apr.). Both authors are terrorism experts with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-area think tank with informal ties to policymakers. "For information publishers like ourselves, working in these areas for many years, these issues have been in the forefront of our lists and have suddenly gotten more attention," said John Berger, v-p and publishing director.
Pluto Press, a London-based independent publisher of social sciences titles, had to rush to reprint more than once Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism by American television journalist John Cooley (Nov. 2000) and Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan by U.K. television journalist Michael Griffin (June). Pluto's first reprint editions of 12,000 of each title were sold out three to four days after they came off the presses in early October.
The first sign things had changed at Fons Vitae, a Louisville, Ky.—based specialty publisher in classic texts of Islam and other world religions, was not more orders but hate mail. "This was my first signal what would be going on," said Bernadette Dieker, assistant director of the press. "This very noticeable ignorance among people bothered me, because so many of our problems come from ignorance." Almost as quickly, however, she received a call from a local independent bookseller, asking for her thoughts about books the retailer could recommend to customers.
Fons Vitae's books are aimed at readers who already have a basic understanding of Islam and are looking for advanced knowledge. "Our books for the most part are a second tier of information," Dieker said. "A basic understanding is needed before someone can read al-Ghazali" (a 12th-century Islamic philosopher and theologian). But the publisher's The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad (May), an Austrian journalist who converted to Islam in 1926, is definitely experiencing increased sales.
A Range of Views
Unsurprisingly, given the breadth of information and possible opinions, books with clear, and very different, viewpoints on Islam are also in demand. One such title is Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus, 1995). Ibn Warraq is a controversial former Muslim who writes critically about the faith he left. Since September 11, the book has sold more than 10,000 copies, said Prometheus publicity associate Lynn Pasquale.
Also ranking in Amazon's top-100 religion list is Islam Revealed: A Christian Arab's View of Islam by Anis A. Shorrosh (1988), a backlist title from evangelical Christian publisher Thomas Nelson now drawing new interest. And Islam Will Conquer All Other Religions and American Power Will Diminish: Read How Allah (God's) Prediction Will Soon Come to Pass by Mohamed Azad and Bibi Amina (Bell Six, Mar.) at one point in early October ranked number 86. Author and publisher Azad, a landlord in New York, told PW in an e-mail that he had sold 1,160 copies of a print run of 2,000.
"Everybody brings something to the table," observed Kazi's Bakhtiar. "There's a propaganda war going on out there."
