The Case For Not Reading Fluff This Summer

Somehow, somewhere along the line, "summer reading" became synonymous with bubble gum. We work hard all year, now it's time to head to the beach or the mountains or one's back yard, pull out the trashy novel and vegetate.

So that I don't come across too high and mighty, I will tell you that I have Dan Brown's Inferno and a stack of old People Magazines a mile high waiting for more than one such moment.

At the same time, the brief pause we call summer has always been for me a time to reflect and think -- two of the rarest indulgences in our fast-paced, hyper-focused and thus often myopic existences. To think. To reflect. To question our own narratives. To visit places we rarely can. To, in Atticus Finch's wonderful words, get into a man's shoes and walk around a little.

It is more than an indulgence. It is a necessity in navigating these increasingly complicated and surprising days, where we all suffer from a near ADD-obsession to make snap decisions and move on to the next thing.

I have a pretty good stack of books that I suspect will push my thinking greatly this summer, but I'd like to call out two.

My Isl@m -- How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind - and Doubt Freed My Soul (www.myislambook.com) in its title alone will set off a host of reactions based on the eye of the beholder. And it does provoke, because it's author, Amir Ahmad Nasr, is one of a collection of outstanding young bloggers from the Middle East and Africa who have eloquently questioned the paradigms they inherited.

What makes this book so remarkable is that while it offers an insightful first-hand account of the simmering, generational unease that built up to the historic regional uprisings, it is also a very personal, introspective journey. Born in the Sudan, raised in Qatar and Malaysia, educated in the US, and travelled almost everywhere in between, Amir has an innate journalist's ability and curiosity to see the worlds around him openly. At the same time, raised devoutly religious and passionate about politics and society, he had to wrestle -- often gut-wrenchingly -- to rethink paradigms core to him and those he loved.

If you don't know very much about Sudan or the Middle East more broadly, and how it fits into the broader changes in the world, Amir will take you by the hand. If you have at best a narrow grasp of the history of Islam and the passionate debates wrestled today, he makes them accessible. If you have any question of what technology can do for people trying to make change from the bottom up, Amir's life experiences will remove all doubt. If you have ever in the darkness of your bedroom wrestled your faith, even angrily rejected it for a time in the face of its inconsistencies and dogmatic demands, you will empathize with and find strength in his questioning, frustration, sadness and courage and that of the remarkable people with whom he connects. He writes:

The sincere pursuit of Truth requires you to entertain the possibility that everything you believe to be 'true' or 'valid' may be wrong. Everything. Your nationalism. Your religious beliefs. Your upbringing. Your unexamined convictions.

This is not an exercise we often do, in uncertain times where people seek the black and white answers of a Fox News or MSNBC -- to steal from Rhienhold Niebuhr, "where as we are uncertain we are doubly certain." Nor is this book a life's story of relativism. It is a story of valuing open inquiry and debate, a belief as he quotes one of his influencers, "If I don't have the freedom to disbelieve, I cannot believe."

As the title suggests, Amir's journey is an indictment of hierarchy in religion where unquestioned and unquestionable dogma can value stories and tradition over personal actions and intent. "Submission. Subordination. Subservience. Three words with means that infuriate me beyond words," he writes. "Three words with meanings you'll still very probably find forced upon you by entities like governments, schools, bullies, community, family and of course the work place."

At the same time, such hierarchical demands fly in the face of the tools of technology that embrace debate, collaboration and transparency. "I became amazed by how wireless telecom technology had spread so fast, and was set to grown even faster in places like India and Africa. The costs of mobile phones and telecom infrastructure were headed downward, while bandwidth capacity was headed upward..." And this access puts the worlds at everyone's finger tips. The United States can look different when one spends hours, he adds, "Reading blogs like TechCrunch, eating up the writings of venture capitalist Paul Graham, and learning more about entrepreneurship."

And, he believes, technology will play a significant role in debates around religion overall. "The digital media tools are now available at our finger tips for us to make full use of in this battle against ignorance and closed-mindedness, and I predict like many rightly have that the Internet will be to Islam what the printing press was to Christianity -- a major driving force for reform."

It is my belief, and one I articulate strongly, in the second book I hope you will consider (with apologies for the selfish plug), that this force of reform will cross every part of society. In Startup Rising -- The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East (www.startuprisingbook.com) I offer a lens not only into a Middle East one rarely hears about in the press, but is part of a larger global change in our midst. Within the next decade, there will be over five billion smartphones on the planet -- not merely communication or entertainment devices, but supercomputing capacity in the hands of two thirds of humanity. We can only guess what innovation and problem solving will come, bottom up, as so many see how each other live, connect, share, have at their fingers tips nearly all of human knowledge essentially for free. The thousands of young entrepreneurs I've seen in the Middle East, concurrently building new futures for the 21st century as leaders from the 20th century seek to protect their own interests, are a wonderful lens onto what that world can look like. And it allows for the debates, changes and connections that Amir describes so well in his life story.

As I wrote this book and read Amir's; as I think about the lightening-speed change in our midst -- unsettling, offering some terrible scenarios -- I remain hopeful. Things could tail spin, but knowledge, experiences, conversations and opportunities are available today that were all but unimaginable even a decade ago. And I'm reminded of a quote from a descendent of Syrian immigrants, Steve Jobs: “And no, we don't know where it will lead. We just know there's something much bigger than any of us here.”

For 50+ more summer favorites from Influencers, check out the full Influencer Summer Guide here.