A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam By Thomas Bauer, translated by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall

Abstract

Thomas Bauer originally published the work under review in German as Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen) in 2011. His ‘alternative history of Islam’ was immediately highly acclaimed as daringly original and has been compared to Edward Said’s Orientalism as a work of cultural studies. A professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, Bauer was awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for Die Kultur der Ambiguität along with his other scholarly achievements—primarily in the field of Arabic literary studies—in 2013. Translated into Slovenian and Turkish in 2014 (the latter is currently in its fifth printing) and into Arabic in 2017, the book has now appeared as A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam in a fine English translation a decade after its original publication. The English version is divided into an introduction and nine chapters. Bauer has updated his foreword to reference relevant books and articles that have been issued since 2011, revisiting many of the ideas in Culture of Ambiguity in Die Vereindeutigung der Welt: Über den Verlust an Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt (Stuttgart, 2018). He also mentions in passing Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), includes it in his bibliography, but does not address it in the body of his work.