Life is More Beautiful than Paradise is an intelligent and critical guide to radical Islam’s unfamiliar debates, preoccupations, motives and intentions.
Fluently written, intellectually gripping, exciting and often funny, this book provides vital key to the understanding of a world that is both a source of fear as well as curiosity for the West.
In 1986 Khaled al-Berry was a fourteen-year-old boy living in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the ‘strong Muslim’ image of a radical Islamist group, his involvement develops until her finds himself increasingly committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities. One day, leaving the university after a demonstration, he is arrested and is soon jailed for his involvement.
On his release al-Berry enrolled at Cairo University and became alienated from radical Islam. In Life is More Beautiful than Paradise he opens a window into the mind of an extremist who turns out to be disarmingly like many other clever adolescents, but one who bears witness to a history with whose reverberations we continue to live.
