among the believers: an islamic journey (vs naipaul)

naipaul critiques the rise of islam as a panacea for all the wrongs of a country, studying its failure to bring salvation to post revolutionary iran, pakistan, and indonesia. it is an academic study of the misguided, yet incredibly prevalent, belief that one religious text can provide the answers for every problem, social, political and economical, a society might face. what's more distressing is how evident it is to the individuals he meets that their reliance on the koran to solve everything is flawed, and yet how unable, or unwilling, to accept this fact they remain. naipaul won the nobel for literature, so it's brilliantly written... the incisive content is an added bonus.