Prayers for the Assassin: A Novel (1) (Assassin Trilogy)

I won't rehash the storyline here; you can read that in the publishing reviews.

I will preface by saying that I spent five years living in the Middle East, and I have to say that based on my experience Ferrigno accurately captures the mind-set and atmosphere that pervades societies run by Muslim theocrats.

This book should serve as a wake-up call for those who value traditional Western values in today's atmosphere of radical Islamo-fascism. In that respect it's very Orwellian.

But better still, there's a really good story wrapped into this package, and I jammed through this book very quickly. The characters are fully fleshed out, engaging, and believable. You really like the good guys, and hate the bad guys. Darwin, the "Assasin", is a terrific villain; complex, many-faceted, extremely dangerous; kind of an athletic Hannibal Lechter without the medical degree. The plot is tight, complex and believable; the climax is satisfying.

I really recommend this book. Ferrigno's done a great job, and this has prompted me to see if he's written other books which I haven't yet read so I can get hold of them.

I am an American Muslim and I have a very hard time believing Muslims themselves would want anything like what is written in the book "Prayers for the Assassin". I could only get through 38 pages because of the poor writing and inaccuracies. If you care to know what the inaccuracies were, they are written below:

1. p 6 - Muslim men don't wear silk.

2. p 12 - Tariq (a Muslim man) could marry a Jew, Christian or Muslim (People of the Book), including Mardi (a Catholic female).

3. p. 13 - Once a Jew converts to Islam, they are accepted as a Muslim. Check the converts in places like the U.S. today, Egypt before Israel was a state and of course, war followed, etc.

4. p. 19 Russian Jews are fleeing Russia for Israel because of the abuses there, 10 years or so later this is going to change?

5. p. 31 Faithful Muslims do not commit suicide, like faithful Catholics, who would consider it a ticket to hell. Suicide bombers are a specific economic and political phenomenon and most likely are in for a big surprise once they're dead.

I could take anymore after page 38. But, I did flip through some of the rest of book. I noticed some cliches, violent scenes, and in general poorly written popular lit. There are people who want this type of novel, fine. A few more notes from the parts I skimmed through:

1. Disneyland would not be destroyed because the country went Muslim. I seriously doubt Mr. Ferrigno has traveled to the Gulf, where amusement parks are all the rage. Of course, the Gulf states aren't known for following Islam well (like not allowing women to vote or drive, clearly allowed in Islam in the beginning in the same exact region).

2. I appreciate the chapters beginning with prayer times, but think the book could educate folks more about Islam by using the names of the prayers and putting a list of the prayer names in an index or in the beginning.

3. I am concerned this book will induce more fear and misunderstanding of Muslims, further widening the gap between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and agnostics or atheists in the United States. Most Muslims (even in "scary" countries like Iran, Iraq, etc) are kind individuals who just want to live their lives, get married, have children, and enjoy each others company. Most Christians in the U.S., Russia, etc also just want to live fulfilling, non-violent lives. But, of course, a few Christians have different ideas too, like the folks who shot Muslims (or Sikhs they thought were Muslim), or shot at men and tried to burn down the Northgate mosque, after 9/11.

I would like to know non-Muslim people's opinions of Islam and Muslims after reading this book.

Robert Ferrigno does make some glaring mistakes in his presentation of Islam. In the new society it seems as if he freely mixes Sunni and Shi'ite together, naming an airport after Khomeini (a Shi'ite), yet using the term, "imam" in the Sunni sense of the word. And Ferringno clearly has little understanding of the exclusively Shi'ite practice of "muta'a" ("pleasure marriage" or temporary marriage). There is more to Shi'ite temporary marriage than Ferrigno has it with johns driving into the ruins of Disneyland, banging hookers and when finished merely pronouncing three times: "I divorce thee." Muta'a is not condoned or practiced by the world's majority Sunni Muslim community. Even most Shi'ites today are embarrassed of it. As for calling the headscarf "habib," Ferrigno never called it any such thing! The term he uses is "hajib" which is probably an honest to goodness typo for "hijab" (by the way, "hajib" was the term used for a court official in Muslim Spain and North Africa).

I believe the previous reviewer is trying to make Ferrigno out as some sort of bigot or islamophobe. I don't see it. Rather, although there is harsh prejudice against the remaining Catholic minority, he shows that the majority of Americans in the world of PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN are now Muslims and they just want to live their lives in peace and happiness. That is why there is a small faction of hardliners (the Dark Robes) trying to impose a Talibani style of society and also why you have the Hasan-i-Sabah wannabe, the "Old One" conspiring to bring about the rebirth of the Caliphate. Let us also not forget that the heroes of this story, Rakkim and Sarah, are both proud Muslims.

All that being said, let me just add that this is still one fantastic novel. Ferrigno incorporates the best elements of the thriller and the alternative history and future shock genres into one supercharged and gripping tale of a broken and demoralized America.

I believe Ferrigno is making some clever and pointed statements about the spiritual state of affairs in America with this book.

We now live in a land where the mall, not the church, is now the center of town. In a time when you need to wait in line for almost anything but a seat at church. More Americans nowadays care to know every triviality about their favorite actors, athletes, singers, even pornstars, than what is going on in their government, their religion, their world. Ferrigno created a world where these negative trends and selfish pursuits of ours might take us. The celebrity and the popular culture are what really matters for far too many Americans today. Note that where in real life the values of faith and family and tradition are still strong - the South and Utah, or amongst the Latino Catholic populations in the Southwest, Ferrigno has them in his novel to be either independent of the Islamic Republic or on the verge of rebellion.

Ferrigno's seems to understand that when you no longer believe in 'something,' you are now open to believe in 'anything.'

Not only is the book badly written, the author clearly has no idea about Islam. Even when writing fiction, one needs some level of knowledge about the subject matter. Check out his "plog" right here on Amazon.com even. He thinks Muslim girls wear "habibs" over their heads! You will find the book full of silly errors and inaccuracies like this which have nothing to do with the fact that the book is fiction but show that the author just didn't care about reading up and took his readers for morons.

Don't bother with this book; it is a waste of time and money.

The work of an ambitious teen, this novel sets out to capitalise on an incoherent American foreign policy. It preys upon (primarily) American fears but ultimately collapses under the weight of it's own cynicism. An awful book. And a shameless writer.

An Islamic takeover of America is an interesting premise and a timely one, but ultimately it is a premise that deserves a better set of books than the Assassin trilogy. Besides the stilted prose and wretched dialog, there are too many bits that just don't work. Instead of a cautionary tale, the Islamic element is just a plaything, a vehicle for the author's interest in murder, mayhem and dismemberment in all their glorious variety.

In some ways, the Islamic America described in the books is believable, at least in its technological decline, they're living on the intellectual capital of the old America; the regime hides the fact that things don't work. But I don't buy his explanation of how they got there. The supposed "cascade of celebrity conversions" is not plausible. I don't see American masses following Tom Cruise into Scientology today and I don't see them following a latter-day Oprah into Islam. Even the trauma of nuclear attacks on NY and DC does not explain it; I don't think people became attracted to Islam in mass numbers after 9/11. Even the fabricated "Zionist betrayal" would have been more likely to lead to a resurgence of simple, traditional anti-Semitism than to Islam. It is such an alien creed to our tradition that I don't think you can get there without some other big contributing factor; such as, perhaps, propaganda in schools for several generations (which is already beginning today: my elementary-age children brought home projects about the holiday of Eid!), or an establishment of a parallel legal system like they already have in Britain. A word or two about how all this coexists with the First Amendment (which they apparently still have) would also have been nice.

I looked up Ferrigno because Prayers for the Assassin is mentioned in Mark Steyn's America Alone in support of the idea they apparently both share, that the decline of the West and the looming success of Islam has to do with the fact that the West has stopped having babies. But Steyn has developed this idea over an entire book while Ferrigno gives it exactly one sentence in the mouth of his arch-villain, the Old One.

Secondly, the idea of a MODERATE Islamic republic doesn't work. I don't know of any example in history where Islamic takeover, whether by violent coup or by stealth, has produced a moderate state. The Iranian takeover in 1979 did not produce a moderate regime, and that was in a country where Islam was already part of their indigenous tradition. When individuals convert, they usually convert into an extreme, expansionist, proselytizing form of the religion: witness Adam Gadahn or John Walker Lindh. The Wahhabi version of Islam, which is actively pursuing Western converts today and funding mosques and madrassas everywhere, is not moderate. The versions that I know of that are moderate, for example, those that exist along the southern rim of the former Soviet Union, are tribal and traditional and do not proselytize; and are being aggressively misplaced by the Wahhabi version. Moderate Islam, in fact, is moderate exactly in the degree that it relaxes its essential core teachings and goals of world domination.

The author's moderate Muslims, especially his good guys, like James Dougan, Sarah and Rakkim, are pure fiction and fantasy, their supposed Muslim pieties purely ornamental. Their inner lives certainly have nothing in common with modern Muslims in Turkish or Egyptian novels that I have read. Underneath it all they function exactly like today's post-Christian Americans; all faiths are equal, all roads lead to God, all Gods are the same and none really matter very much, certainly not to practical ethics; the same amorphous spiritual mush. This, perhaps, is the greatest disservice the author does to his premise. For if moderate Islam were in fact like that, some might feel it no great loss if it were to take over America.

His Christians are not much better, worse, in fact, because they are all grotesques and caricatures. The story line is that, after the nuclear attacks on NY and DC and the famous "cascade of conversions," the remaining Catholics stayed in the Islamic republic as dhimmis while the Protestants fled to the Bible Belt. Apparently, in his America in 2010's (i.e., now, as I write my review) there were no Buddhists and no Jews, except for one family. But the Protestants are represented mainly by low-brow snake-handling charismatic marginals, and the Catholics have no spirituality at all. Utterly absent are today's regular people that I see around me, the middle America types who, I'm willing to bet, in such a scenario would fall neither for Islam nor for end-times hooplah because they have their own thing. Not all of them are Christian, even, but they still retain the collective essence of American-ness that is so absent from the books that it is unclear why the good guys at the end are even working toward reunification, because nothing of value from the old (i.e., today's) America is mentioned, other than sex, drugs and rock'n'roll on one hand and cool "black ice" weapons projects on the other.

There are a couple of real howlers, such as that the most advanced weapons system in the 2040's is manufactured in Nigeria. Really? China would work, indeed any Asian country -- centuries-old traditions, hard-working, educated populations, -- and indeed China is the other country in the books that builds advanced weapons; but Nigeria? I understand that this is fiction, dystopia, but if the author wants me to swallow this he ought to at least say a word or two about what happened to transform today's Nigeria into a country capable of such an achievement. Simply nuking the competition won't get you there.

Another one is the enemy in book 3, a resurgent Mexico that has dusted off its ancestral pre-Christian pantheon, renamed itself Aztlan and built pyramids for religious ceremonies. I shared this with our former nanny, a young lady of excellent sense from Mexico, who thought it was utter nonsense.

But the sad part is that these books may have pre-empted the field. Just like no one is likely to make another Lord of the Rings film anytime soon because Peter Jackson's glossy vacuities occupy that space, so there are (to my knowledge) no other novels, at least in English, about an Islamic takeover. And that is a shame, because, as I said, it is a premise that deserves a good set of novels to make people think.

This book could not be more topical and so easily read. I expect its Islamic hero is at least one reason it hasn't gotten much comment and that's a shame because this is such a fine thriller/mystery/book. A terrific read. I sent it to my brother, my father-in-law and several friends.

Imagine a near-future world in which the U.S. has been upset by an Islamic revolution in the aftermath of hideous nuclear attacks. Fascinating book so well written; and on top of that, a really good thriller. This book fulfills on so many levels one almost must groan in delight.

Whether Noel Hynd (as "reviewer" Natalie Hernandez)is taking swipes at Ferrigno or not, he is right.

This would have been a much better book if it was set in the Muslim Europe of the next century.

Face it folks, if anyone adopts Islam it will be the quickly degenerating Northern and Western Europeans. They will have to beacause the growing Middle Eastern/South Asian/North African populations there will eventually come to dominate and they will force it on native Europeans.

...but I read the first 75 pages and found this book to be completely implausible. Societies do not change as quickly as the author posits. The US is still healing wounds from the Civil War 150 years ago and he suggests we will break apart into a new society in the next 25 with current blue-states becoming pro-Islamic. ....No way. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

I'm not sure where I got that intro. I think saw it on an Army base somewhere in the south when I was first inducted. Really. They had that on a government training base. Talk about irony.

Well, I've cheered for guys named Hawk, guys named Joe, Dave, and Marcus, I've dug chicks with the improbable title of 'Detective Sergeant Havers' and of course Sunny, but I'm pretty sure I've never rooted for a guy named Rakkim.

What a fascinating, pulsating novel. You want to read something different? Read this. I have to admit, I thought about putting it down. Right around the 60's or the 70's (page #s) it seemed to not have any 'sticking power.' Well written but maybe too odd. The Super Bowl? Funny? Serious? Cartoon-like? The Colorussos, Anthony and Anthony Jr? But I tell you, I like Mr. Ferrigno a lot. And he rarely disappoints. And then "Prayers for the Assassin" took off.

We avoid, at the penalty of not being threaded with the other reviews, commenting on 'other reviews.' Well there is a very positive review (like mine) that mentions whom this reviewer would cast in a movie. ME TOO. I had the same actors in mind.

Interesting people in this novel, 50 years in the future. Like many of Robert's characters, the good survive, barely, with cuts and scratches and a couple of gunshot wounds but with a chance here and there to fool around, and the bad . . . well they're really bad. Rakkim, Spider, Sarah, Thomas-Redbeard, the Old One, the terrible Darwin, and the Anthony's, father and son.

There is a curt dismissal of the book in one of the editorial reviews that it suffers from 'a damaging air of implausibility.' Well, I would submit to you that any novelist who puts his or her plot in an unfamiliar venue will offend the traditionalists. Before Hammet and Chandler, the detective mystery was yawned at, barely better than the comics. There were no African American heros, and women . . . there was no Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Patricia Cornwall and the rest. So, that criticism is apocryphal.

I'm not going to talk about the story because you already know that. But Bob, you did a great job of keeping it all together. I can't wait for II and III. 5 stars. Larry Scantlebury