New York, USA - Just in time to mark today's celebration of holy days for two major world religions — Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year — comes a new series of little books explaining both faiths.
What Do Muslims Believe? The Roots and Realities of Modern Islam, by Ziauddin Sardar, a London-based commentator on Islam and culture, and What Do Jews Believe? The Customs and Culture of Modern Judaism, by Edward Kessler, founder of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Christian Relations at Cambridge, England, are in stores this week. Publisher Walker & Co. promises handbooks on Christianity and Buddhism in February.
Each book offers just over 100 pages of tightly formatted highlights of the history, significance and practice of the faiths and concludes with suggestions for further study. They're well-indexed, in case a reader wants to cut through the detailed chapter on the life of Mohammed to learn about the prophet's crucial night journey when he received the revelations of the Quran.
But the books offer more than facts. Both authors sometimes add a personal spin to their summaries.
In describing how Muslims are expected to follow the daily life practices of the Prophet by how they eat, dress, even clean their teeth, Sardar adds that among his followers, "the Prophet's generosity and forgiveness, compassion and civility, his strong sense of justice and equality, his passion for thought and learning are often conspicuous by their absence."
Kessler begins his chapter on Jewish beliefs about God by saying that "for many Jews, myself included, the encounter with God is more than an acceptance of an intellectual proposition. I believe God cares about humanity and I believe in a personal God."
The Believe books are the second wave of little religion books launched from England, and readers who want a firmer grasp of the faiths may want to look into the Key Words series by Ron Geaves, a professor of religious studies at the University of Chester. These books include Key Words in Islam, as well as Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism.
The trend to terse handbooks is not surprising, says Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly and author of several books on religion.
"One hundred pages is the magic number: It's all anyone will read on anything that's a fixed page, not interactive. And religion, a topic people are passionate about, is more amenable to this kind of formatting," Tickle says.
She notes that Web references are longer than the list of books for further reading.
"The idea is to give you a book that expands to the level of your interest, a framework for asking more questions."
It's a structure that seems suitable for one of Kessler's stories about Rabbi Hillel, one of the rabbis who kept Judaism alive after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 by restructuring religious practice on the Torah, the Hebrew Bible.
A prospective convert challenged Hillel, "Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot." And Hillel replied, "Do not do unto others as you would not wish to be done to yourself; this is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary, go and learn it."