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The wait is over! The Lit Blog Co-Op has finally announced its first pick for the Read This! book club. Go here for the unveiling!

My review of Reza Aslan’s excellent No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here is an excerpt:

Debates [between traditionalists and reformers], Aslan concludes, show that Islam is as ordinary in its development as Christianity or Judaism: It is going through the same tensions between traditionalists and reformers that its monotheistic predecessors have. At this moment in its history, Aslan says, the Ulama, or clerics, still wield an enormous amount of power over the interpretation of faith in most Muslim countries, as well as a large amount of control over matters of the state in places such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan. But that is changing, with reformers in Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and the United States speaking up and demanding changes.

In much of “No god but God,” Aslan castigates the Ulama for the powers they have retained. But Aslan himself is an alim of sorts. While he might claim to be a mere scholar of the Islamic Reformation, he is also one of its most articulate advocates.

Read it in full here.

Here’s an interesting (but somewhat disjointed) interview of Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose next novel, Desertion, is due out in the U.S. in the summer. And over at The Guardian, Adam Mars-Jones reviews the novel, of whose title he says that it “presides over the book from a strange distance, never quite attaching itself to the characters or their doings.”

The Guardian has a fascinating profile by Maya Jaggi of the legendary Senegalese novelist/screenwriter/director Ousmane Sembene. (His latest film, Moolade, was released in the U.S. late last year, and is opening in Britain this week.) Sembene started his career as a novelist, but turned to film in order to reach a wider audience in Africa. I was particularly interested in this tidbit about African cinema and how it is regressing due to many factors, including the obvious one: economics.

Sembene has always been uncomfortable with French sponsorship and patronage, though what is known as African cinema, Shiri points out, “was born out of France’s desire to retain cultural influence in the continent”, through subsidies to officially approved films. Sembene increasingly taps EU coffers. “I go everywhere, knock on all doors,” he says.

According to Talbot, he has “always been in total financial control of his work; he has all his negatives.” For Sembene, “Africa is my audience; the west and the rest are markets.” But he feels the chronic distribution problem in Africa (where many commercial cinemas offer a diet of Bollywood and kung fu) has “gone backwards not forwards, especially in francophone countries”. Outside festivals, Gadjigo says, “it is hard to see African films in Africa. African leaderships don’t see the role cinema can play in development,” and 90% of Senegalese cinemas have closed in the past 10 years. Shiri notes that under IMF belt-tightening in the 1980s and 90s, “governments weren’t given any leeway to support culture”.

Read the rest here.

Over at Egypt Today, Manal el-Jesri revisits last November’s Frankfurt Book Fair, where the Arab world was the guest of honor, and asks:

Did we expect too much from a five-day event? More importantly: Did we arm ourselves with the needed tools? Yes to the first, no to the second.

El-Jesri discusses coverage in German vs. Arab media, the poor efforts by publishers to sell their books’ rights to European presses, and the lack of content diversity in the Arab Publishers’ offerings. But the fair was not a lost opportunity, he says, and there is still time to act before the next edition.

You can read other recaps and articles about the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair in Moorishgirl’s archives.