A Critical Response to: My Year Inside Radical Islam

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross wrote a book entitled: My Year Inside Radical Islam, which provides an account of how he came to learn about with Islam, and, then, later on in his book, how he gradually fell under the influence of a Muslim group which was rabidly fundamentalist in its teachings and practices and espoused a version of Islam that was quite different from the understanding of Islam to which he initially was introduced and to which he originally had been attracted. Toward the latter part of his book, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross describes the circumstances, experiences, and thoughts which eventually led to his exit not only from the fundamentalist Muslim group with which he spent time, but, as well, led, eventually, to his exit from Islam when he became affiliated with a Christian church.

The present critical review of Mr. Gartenstein-Ross' book points out that the fundamentalist Muslim group to which he belonged was not teaching about Islam but was, instead, propagating its own invented theology which the group sought to pass off as Islamic much as a counterfeiter seeks to pass off phony money as the real thing. During the course of this critical review, Mr. Whitehouse also seeks to indicate how Mr. Gartenstein-Ross appears to have failed to take responsibility for his own spiritual decisions and, in the process, ceded his moral, spiritual, and intellectual authority to so-called leaders -- both in the case of the fundamentalist Muslim group as well as in relation to the Christian preachers to whom he subsequently listened -- thereby seeming to have committed the same basic mistake in both instances [i.e., his conversion to Islam and his conversion to Christianity] since he appears to have permitted himself to come under the influence of the theological thinking of others [both Muslim and Christian theologians] rather than taking control of his own critical engagement of spiritual issues.

The review is 52 pages in length.