Category Archives: Books You Should Read

Saliba on Europe and Islamic Science

Books You Should Read, Islam in Europe, Islamic Sciences, Scholars

[On Rorotoko, historian of science George Saliba discusses the writing of his recent book, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).]

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh.

I was trained in ancient Semitics, and mathematics, but I was always interested in these rumors that the general reader knows about, that the great invention of science was a really Greek project. And that everything else is either a shadow or a continuation of the classic antiquity.

Growing up, you assimilate these paradigms. You begin to think that these are the normal things. But then, trained in mathematics, and beginning to read a little bit of what was produced in the Islamic civilization, in science, I grew curious. I grew curious because I began to note that some of the science produced was not a shadow of the Greek project. It was more re-focusing of light, a new way of looking at things, which the Greeks did not know.

I began to also wonder about a fact that many a student of history and general reader would know. That there was this period of fantastical effervescence in the classical Greek tradition, say from the 4th century BC to the 2nd century AD. All the major names that we can think of happen to be in this period, all the major classics, in every discipline you can think of, from Plato to Aristotle to Ptolemy to Euclid to Diophantus to Galen to Dioscorides. And all comes to an end by the 2nd century. Then nothing happened. And then, all of a sudden, we begin to hear, in the 9th century, of the crazy caliphs of Baghdad who are spurring this and that, translating this and that, incorporating all of the Greek material. Continue reading Saliba on Europe and Islamic Science →

Poetry out of Arabia

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Folklore and Proverbs, Languages, Literature, Poetry, Saudi Arabia

[Webshaykh’s note: Dr. Saad Sowayan, as the post below will explain, has been collecting, analyzing and documenting the oral poetic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, especially his native Saudi Arabia, since his graduate research. He has now completed two major works, available for reading on the internet, but still in search of an appropriate publisher. I invite readers to look over his impressive documentation and analysis and communicate with Dr. Sowayan any ideas that may help forward his project.]

by Dr. Saad Sowayan, King Saud University

After 10 years of continuous hard work, I managed to finish the two books, which, taking the size and importance of each, I consider to be my lifetime projects.
A) Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia (1131 pages)
B) The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry & Culture Across the Ages: An Anthropological Approach (820 pages).

The first work, as its title says, is a collection of Bedouin narratives and poems relating to tribal genealogies, camel marks, tribal territories, water wells, sheikhs, warriors, tribal judges, tribal poets, personal histories, as well as narratives relating to raids and counter raids amongst tribes and other events. All of these are told by competent narrators & reciters in the various tribal dialects and all go back to pre and early 20th century. I have been engaged in taping this voluminous material during the span of the 4 years extending from 1982 up to 1985. Since 1995 I have been engaged in archiving, indexing, transcribing and editing this taped material which came to a total of several hundred hours of recorded interviews. Legends & Oral Historical Narratives from Northern Arabia (1131 pages) is the result of this effort very carefully transcribed and edited in Arabic script with full voweling tashkeel. The work comes with a very detailed table of contents and an introduction explaining the nature of the material along with some linguistic remarks and explanation of the transcription method I used. All in all, the work is a primary source on Arabian nomadic tribal culture, oral literature and vernacular language. This work constitutes a compliment to the works of P. Marcel Kurpershoek published in English by Brill in Leiden. Continue reading Poetry out of Arabia →

Talal Asad on Anthropological Inquiry

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Scholars

[Note: In preparing for my role to respond to presentations on the work of Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam at AAR recently, I reread portions of the edited volume Powers of the Secular Modern (edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 206-207). In doing so I found a valuable excerpt at the start of Asad’s specific responses to the essays int he volume. Given the interest at the AAR meeting in anthropological and ethnographic approaches to Islam, I think Asad’s general comments below on the role of anthropology are relevant and worth perusing.]

The only point I want to stress at the outset is that for me anthropology is a continuous exploration of received ideas about the way given modes of life hang together. More precisely: What is included or excluded in the concepts that help to organize our collective lives? How? Why? With what probable consequences for behavior and experience? Such an inquiry requires that one be ready to break out of the coercive constraints of Sociological Truth — the axiom that the social is the ground of being. The results, however provisional, can be uncomfortable, and they may sometimes point to politically incorrect conclusions. What we eventually do with them is another matter, because we are not abstract intellectuals. All of us live in particular forms of life that constantly demand decisions and that in general presuppose a variety of commitments. And we all have particular memories, fears, and hopes. Continue reading Talal Asad on Anthropological Inquiry →

Bringing al-Zabîdî to Light and to Life

Books You Should Read, Egypt, Languages, Literature, Scholars, Sufism, Sunni, Tihama, Traditions (hadith literature), Yemen


19th century Cairo mosque illustration from Henry Van-Lennep’s Bible Customs.

Those of us who spend hours using Arabic lexicons would be at a loss without the massive Tâj al-‘Arûs min jawâhir al-qâmûs of Muhammad Murtadâ al-Zabîdî. Completed by this consummate Muslim scholar in 1188/1774 after fourteen years of diligent research, the recent Kuwait edition comprises 40 volumes. Ironically, what took al-Zabîdî fourteen years to write and dictate seems a rapid turn-around, given that the Kuwait edition began in 1960 and was not completed until 2002 [There is a copy available for only £2,463 from Abe Books…, but I suggest you go to Lebanon, where the 40 volume set is only $325 from Fadak Books I am not aware of any online version of Tâj, although Lisân al-‘Arab is available online in searchable format.] Those of us who could never afford to house the 40 volume edition have managed to get by with reprints of the 19th century Cairo edition, funky font presence that it sheds. I remember buying my copy of the thick black-cover volumes in 1981, filling a suitcase with the hefty weight, paying the porter a handsome bakshish for his back-breaking effort at Cairo airport, and then having the suitcase implode from the weight as I crossed the threshhold of my home back in New York. I like to think that my own account would have made its way into al-Zabîdî’s inquisitive notes. Continue reading Bringing al-Zabîdî to Light and to Life →

We Are All Moors

Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe

[Note: The latest book by Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) provides a provocative thesis, suggesting that we examine the issue of Muslim minorities in contemporary Europe through the prism of history, specifically the treatment of the Moors (los Moros) in Spain. Here is a sample of his argument (from pp. 3-4).]

Indeed, anyone watching the events unfolding in Europe and the United States in recent years cannot help but be struck by the confluence of the two overriding concerns of these two continental states: the mounting anxiety over coexisting with Muslims and the seemingly unstoppable waves of illegal and nonassimilable immigrants. All sorts of explanations have been offerd about these twin elements fueling the global crisis — bookshelves are filled with books about Islam, minorities, and questions of immigration — but no one seems to be reading the intense debate over immigration and minorities who resist assimilation as the continuation of a much older conflict, the one pitting Christendom against the world of Islam. We are often being asked to ponder “what is wrong with Islam” and “what is wrong with the West,” as if these two abstract, ideological entities suddenly bumped into each other in their travels and were jolted by the shock of discovery. The West encountered an archaic Islam stuck int he primitivism of pre-modern cultures, whereas Muslims discovered a dizzying, fast-dissolving secular West that is guided by the fleeting fantasies of materialism. All of this is by now amply documented. Yet what I propose in this book is that a secular, liberal Western culture and Islam were never really parted, that they ahve been traveling together since (at least) 1492, despite all attempts to demarcate, first, zones of Christian purity and , later, national homogeneity. Continue reading We Are All Moors →

Contesting Islamism

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Islamophobia, Scholars, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue

Stanford University Press has just published Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, edited by Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar. In this book Political Scientist Donald Emmerson argues for an inclusive use of the term “Islamism” in order to rescue the term from its misappropriation in the media. This is followed by my essay, in which I argue that the term “Islamism” is as tainted as “Mohammedanism” and should be avoided as a replacement for fundamentalist and political Islam. Our two essays are followed by twelve short responses from a variety of perspectives, Muslim and non-Muslim. The contributors include Feisal Abdul Rauf, Syed Farid Alatas, Hillel Fradkin, Graham Fuller, Hasan Hanafi, Amir Hussain, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Bruce Lawrence, Anouar Majid, Angel Rebasa and Nadia Yassine. Given the range of perspectives on one of the hot topics of the day, this volume will be a great addition to courses on Islam or the Middle East.

The publisher’s description is presented below: Continue reading Contesting Islamism →

Saliba on Islamic Science and the Renaissance

Books You Should Read, Islamic Sciences

[Note: The cover interview of Rorotoko has an essay by historian of Islamic science George Saliba on his fascinating study entitlted Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Here is the start of the essay, the whole of which can be read at Rorotoko.]

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh.

I was trained in ancient Semitics, and mathematics, but I was always interested in these rumors that the general reader knows about, that the great invention of science was a really Greek project. And that everything else is either a shadow or a continuation of the classic antiquity.

Growing up, you assimilate these paradigms. You begin to think that these are the normal things. But then, trained in mathematics, and beginning to read a little bit of what was produced in the Islamic civilization, in science, I grew curious. I grew curious because I began to note that some of the science produced was not a shadow of the Greek project. It was more re-focusing of light, a new way of looking at things, which the Greeks did not know. Continue reading Saliba on Islamic Science and the Renaissance →

With Van-Lennep in Bible Lands: 3

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Lithographs, Orientalism, Travel


Van-Lennep’s album cover

In 1862 Henry J. Van-Lennep published twenty original chromolithographs of life in Ottoman Turkey. These include two scenes of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, “A Turkish Effendi,” “Armenian Lady (at home),” “Turkish and Armenian Ladies (abroad),” “Turkish Scribe,” “Turkish Lady of Rank (at home),” “Turkish Cavass (police officer),” “Turkish Lady (unveiled),” “Armenian Piper,” “Armenian Ladies (at home),” “Armenian Marriage Procession,” “Armenian Bride,” “Albanian Guard,” “Armenian Peasant Woman,” “Bagdad Merchant (travelling),” “Jewish Marriage,” “Jewish Merchant,” “Gypsy Fortune Telling,” “Bandit Chief,” “Circassian Warrior,” and “Druse Girl.” The lithographer for Van-Lennep’s paintings was Charles R. Parsons (1821-1910).


Van-Lennep’s illustration of a Turkish Lady of Rank (At Home)

Continue reading With Van-Lennep in Bible Lands: 3 →