Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic intellectual history

Abstract

Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History, by Tamara Sonn. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv + 175 pages. Notes to p. 201. Index to p. 206. $39.95. One of most interesting by-products of postcolonial studies has been reexamination of problem of diffusion of ideas. Whereas idealist historians once assumed that non-European intellectuals and activists merely recycled, albeit imperfectly, ideologies first propounded in Europe, contemporary theorists have focused on selection, recontextualization and transformation of those ideologies by indigenous thinkers. Tamara Sonn's translation of and commentary on Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History provides an illuminating case study of this process. Bandali Jawzi was born in Jerusalem in 1872. Educated by Orthodox missionaries, he moved to Russia in 1891 to continue his studies. He received a Ph.D. from Kazan University, obtained a faculty appointment at Baku University in 1920, and five years later became dean of university. Soon thereafter, Jawzi published Islamic Intellectual History, first volume of a projected twovolume work. Although controversial, Sonn reports that book was quickly accepted into body of Arab scholarship (p. 4). Twice in her commentary Sonn calls Jawzi's book the first Marxist interpretation of development of Islamic thought (pp. 5, 16). Actually, as Sonn herself demonstrates, Islamic Intellectual History might better be described as a hybrid work. Sonn traces two major influences on Jawzi. First, there was Marxism: Jawzi derived his Marxist view from several sources, including doctrines of Mir Said Sultan Galiev, who believed that entire nations within international system might be accorded bourgeois or proletarian status. Condemned by Stalin as heresy of Sultangalievism, Marxism to which Jawzi was exposed foreshadowed and may have directly contributed to ideology of mid-20th-century Third Worldism. This section of Sonn's commentary is particularly enlightening: While doctrinal cross-fertilization between, for example, Egypt and Levant is well known, ideological linkage connecting Arab Middle East, Russia, and Muslim Central Asia has not received scrutiny it undoubtedly deserves. The second influence on Jawzi was that which Sonn calls the central hermeneutic of Islamic jurisprudence (p. 7): ijtihad, practice of using reason to accommodate Islam to changing circumstances. Ijtihad is integral to Sonn's analysis of Jawzi for two reasons: First, although support for practice has varied over course of Islamic history, Sonn writes that it was once again ascendant during Jawzi's time, thanks to efforts of Islamic reformers. Therefore, Sonn concludes, it should not be surprising that assumptions that informed Jawzi's practice of history-his belief in contingency of knowledge, his repudiation of purportedly authoritative sources, and his attempts to deduce true meaning of Islamic history from Quran-had previously informed practice of ijtihad. …