Book Reviews

Abstract

Religion and Culture in Medieval IslamRICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH (Eds), 1999Giorgio Levi della Vida Conferences, 14Cambridge, Cambridge University Pressviii_118 pp., UK£32.50ISBN 0-521-623502This book contains the proceedings of a conference whose speakers and theme were chosen by Professor George Makdisi, recipient of the Giorgio Levi della Vida Award in 1993. Although the theme is quite wide, the tone and viewpoint of the book are consistent with each other and coherent with Makdisi's own position, which he summarises in the first chapter, "Religion and culture in classical Islam and the Christian West". Here, Makdisi gives an overview of the fascinating theory which he has expounded in several works over the past decades (especially his The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981) and The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh, 1990)), explaining how came to be interested in this subject and linking it to the modern-day American situation. Makdisi's view is that the European scholastic and humanistic movements had their origin in two equivalent movements that had begun some centuries earlier in the Middle East and, through Spain and Sicily, reached the West. This first chapter sets the tone of the whole book, which deals with several Arabo-Islamic subjects, making ample references to equivalent or parallel themes in the medieval (and occasionally modern) Christian (and occasionally Jewish) world. W. Montgomery Watt's essay on The future of Islam" compares Jewish reactions to Hellenism in Antiquity with contemporary Muslim reactions to the Western, Christian culture. It is a very stimulating piece, and the daring juxtapposition of past and present provokes important questions: to what extent can one think, today, of different parts of our globalised world simply Muslim or Christian, albeit with varying degrees of secularism? How can one deal with the fact that large portions of all societies do not identify themselves in any religion? Returning to a medieval subject, the following two chapters illustrate aspects the relation between religion and literature. Merlin Swartz writes on "Arabic rhetoric and the art of the homily in medieval Islam", pointing to the lack of secondary scholarship on this genre, whose Christian parallel has instead received great attention. Swartz begins filling this gap by describing in great detail the norms laid out in two handbooks for preachers written by Ibn al-Jawzý¯ (d. 597/1201). The fourth chapter, by Irfan Shahý¯d ("Medieval Islam: the literary-cultural dimension") reflects on the Qur'a¯nic idea of i'ja¯z (inimitability) and its consequences for the field of literature, from the times of Muh_ammad to the present day. This is followed by George Saliba's more specific illustration of how three prominent Ash'arite authors refute astrology ("The Ash'arites and the science of the stars"); the issue is placed within the context of the Islamic-Arabic approach to classical Greek heritage. Roger Arnaldez ("Religion, religious culture, and culture") provides an outline of the development of Islam from starting point as a religion containing ancient practices whose origins were forgotten,