[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from the University of Chicago Press on the theme of applied Islam. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Islam and the Rule of Justice: Image and Reality in Muslim Law and Culture
By Lawrence Rosen
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
By Stefania Pandolfo
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Islam and World History: The Ventures of Marshall Hodgson
Edited by Edmund Burke III and Robert J. Mankin
About the Book
About the Authors
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Islam and the Rule of Justice: Image and Reality in Muslim Law and Culture
By Lawrence Rosen
About the Book
With Islam and the Rule of Justice, Lawrence Rosen analyzes a number of the misperceptions about Islamic law that arise when the local cultures in which it is embedded are not taken into account. Drawing on specific cases, he explores the application of Islamic law to the treatment of women (who win most of their cases), the relations between Muslims and Jews (which frequently involve close personal and financial ties), and the structure of widespread corruption (which played a key role in prompting the Arab Spring). From these cases, Rosen studies the role of informal mechanisms in the resolution of local disputes. The author also provides a close reading of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged in an American court with helping to carry out the September 11 attacks, using insights into how Islamic justice works to explain the defendant’s actions during the trial. The book closes with an examination of how Islamic cultural concepts may come to bear on the constitutional structure and legal reforms many Muslim countries have been undertaking.
About the Author
Lawrence Rosen is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of The Culture of Islam; Varieties of Muslim Experience; Bargaining For Reality; and Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew; all also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Scholarly Praise for Islam and the Rule of Justice
“Rosen writes elegantly and clearly about issues relating to Islam, the Arab world, and law. He writes with a great deal of expertise, based on his fieldwork in Morocco, his knowledge of US law, and his wide reading, especially in Islamic law.”—John R. Bowen, Washington University in St. Louis
“At a moment when, around the world, the image of Islam has negative connotations—whether in political discourse, the media or public opinion more generally—Rosen offers an analysis of Islamic law that deconstructs numerous stereotypes.”—Marie-Claire Foblets, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Additional Information
March 2018
288 Pages
$35 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780226511573
Paper ISBN: 9780226511603
Digital ISBN: 9780226511740
Where to Purchase
The University of Chicago Press
Excerpt
From the Introduction, pages 1-3, 12
Some years ago I co-chaired a meeting of French and American scholars of North Africa. To stimulate discussion I suggested that at our first, informal session we share stereotypes about one another’s different approaches to the region. The advantage, I suggested, was that we would all know that they are just stereotypes—but (I quietly assumed) we would all, to some extent, really believe that they are true. Through stereotypes we could, however, express ourselves unreservedly and then hide behind the excuse that what we were saying was, we knew, just an exaggerated likeness.
The exercise worked wonderfully well: the French told us that Americans come into the area for a few years and then rush off to the next part of the world, while they devoted their entire careers to one place; and my American colleagues told the French that they were too wrapped up in structural schemes to see the ambiguities in which we colonials delight. No one took offense, we all felt better afterward, and we all appreciated that although stereotypes can be unfair, and even if they contain a grain of truth, they may do far more harm than good.
It is somewhat in this spirit that I begin by addressing a set of misperceptions of Islamic law. Although the central focus of this book is to analyze rather than debunk, it is desirable, at a time when the actions of the Taliban and ISIS would seem to validate Western fears and misunderstanding, to address some of the oversimplified views commonly held about Islamic law. A few precautionary notes are, however, worth highlighting.
The predominant focus of this book is on the Arab world, even though it represents only a fraction of the world’s Muslim population. Moreover, when I speak of “the Arabs” it is necessarily in rather general terms, the phrase having to encompass a very wide range of local and historical instances. But if one approaches this diversity in the sense of embracing a range of variations on shared themes, rather than as seeking some definitive essence, readers may wish to ask themselves two interrelated questions: In what sense does what is being described correspond to what has been learned about other parts of the Muslim world, such that one is stimulated to think more carefully about each of those situations? And in what ways do these variations affect one another and the non-Muslim world, since none of the countries or situations described exists in isolation? Taken in this spirit the specific situations to be presented here may help in formulating more precise questions raised by the practice of Islamic law.
That stereotypes of Islam, the Middle East, and Muslim law—favorable and unfavorable—are widespread is evident from even the most causal reading of the Western press. When the Archbishop of Canterbury (2008) suggested that Islamic law forums might be appropriate for handling certain family law matters of Muslims living in the United Kingdom he was roundly excoriated by those who acted as if he had proposed stoning adulterers or hacking off the hands of thieves, notwithstanding the frequent recourse to similar religious courts by Britons of other faiths. In March 2014, the Law Society of Great Britain offered instructions for drawing up a will in conformity with Muslim inheritance practices that grant one-half portions to women as opposed to men and no inheritance to children born out of wedlock, but the outcry was so great that eight months later the Society withdrew its practice note. In the United States 70% of Oklahoma voters favored passage of a referendum barring any use of Islamic law (characterized by the promoters as “a totalitarian socio-political doctrine”), only for a federal court to save them from utter embarrassment by ruling the law unconstitutional. Similarly, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has said that shariʻa is “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom; the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth” and therefore “we should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in sharia, they should be deported.” One town in Canada initially barred the use of Islamic law within its precincts even though there was not a single Muslim living there, while the province of Ontario forbade any religious court involvement in family law disputes, to the considerable consternation of Jews, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and indigenous peoples who use such forums regularly. In short, one only has to keep up with the nightly news and op-ed commentary to witness images of Islamic law as brutality against women and punishments of Biblical intensity in order to realize how deeply these stereotypes influence the popular imagination.
Even scholarly literature is not entirely immune from misplaced emphases, especially as concerns a tendency to assume that Islamic law lives in the scholars’ texts much more than in the daily lives of the courts and ordinary citizens’ understanding of the law and its implementation. By contrast, the orientation throughout this book—as might be expected from one who is both an anthropologist and a common law lawyer—is toward Islamic law as a living system, one that is found as much in the marketplace and the home as in the textbooks, a law that is deeply subject to local custom, factual context, permissible interpretation, client choice, and judicial discretion. Just as Islam is what Muslims believe and do, Islamic law is where it is practiced and documented, influencing the decisions of daily life, underscoring the broad assumptions about human nature and human relationships, and supporting the sense of a world whose orderliness is highly contingent on and contextually embedded in those moral and commonsense propositions that suffuse the social lives of the community.
. . .
It was Samuel Butler who said that “there is a science of the aspect of things as well as of their nature,” and from the perspective of an anthropologist who is concerned with the often unforeseen connections among the multiple domains of life it is precisely an exploration of aspects rather than a taxonomy of essences that often has the greatest heuristic value. Turning a given feature of a culture to see its facets and linkages or assessing how the items arrayed add up to more than the sum of their parts is to avail oneself of the benefits of a synoptic view—an overview, a view of instances and manifestations—no less than an analytic one. This means seeing Islamic law as part of culture and not simply as a refined attribute of faith. Perceiving Islamic law through the lens of culture is to take seriously the connections its adherents suggest and demonstrate in their everyday lives, and hence to rejoin, at one extreme, the most recondite of legal precepts and, at the other, the most vital sources of the law’s legitimacy. Throughout, the common theme we see is that Islamic law is integral to that broader set of categories by which people grasp their world and create their own experience of it. And if it is true that nothing is so sad as the failure to understand another’s culture, then hopefully this narrative of Islamic law may, in its own way, encourage us to bridge that doleful gap.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
By Stefania Pandolfo
About the Book
Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul.
Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation.
This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.
About the Author
Stefania Pandolfo is professor and director of the UC Berkeley Medical Anthropology Program on Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Impasse of the Angels, also published by the University of Chicago Press. https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/stefania-pandolfo
Scholarly Praise for Knot of the Soul
“Knot of the Soul combines sensitive ethnography, Islamic practices of healing, and suggestive encounters with psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory. Pandolfo has written an unusually insightful work that serves as an excellent example of the riches that these three different traditions, in conversation with one another, can offer our contemporary understanding of madness and reason. It deserves to be widely read and pondered.”–Talal Asad, City University of New York
“Knot of the Soul is a stunning breakthrough book. Creating its own genre—not by mixing existing genres but by seeing beyond their divisions—it exposes the profound homologies between Sufi philosophy and psychoanalysis and the structural madness that haunts the subject, for good as well as ill. Beautifully written and conceptually precise, it cannot but convince readers of the timeliness and inestimable value of these marginalized discourses.”–Joan Copjec, Brown University
“Reading this book is both an intellectual and an aesthetic experience. Pandolfo’s subtle and nuanced rendering of the meandering life of reason, unreason, terror, and hope is unparalleled in anthropological and psychiatric literature. Her deep knowledge of Islamic theology and poetry, her mastery over anthropological and psychoanalytical theory, and, above all, her capacity to listen, show what an anthropological devotion to the world might mean.”–Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University
Additional Information
May 2018
384 Pages
$37.50(list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780226464923
Paper ISBN: 9780226465081
Digital ISBN: 9780226465111
Where to Purchase
The University of Chicago Press
Excerpt
From Chapter 12: “The Psychiatrist and the Imam”; Pages 280-282 , 284-285
I met Dr. A. in 2001, when he was a second- year resident at the psychiatric hospital in Sale. As with many of the younger psychiatrists, I spent time with him in the emergency room and at the morning staff meetings. I sat with him as he evaluated patient after patient, often in the presence of families or family friends. In the ER, time contracts and decisions have to be made quickly; configurations of symptoms must be assessed, the necessary information from different sources gathered, including family history, history of the illness, history of previous hospitalization, if any, and finally a recourse to some form of therapy and a pharmacological prescription. Sometimes, in the short and often nonexistent pauses between a patient leaving, a door closing and opening again with another story of illness, we exchanged a few words about what we saw and heard. Back then, in my eyes, Dr. A. seemed not very different from many of his colleagues in the way he attempted to fulfill the requirements of his position. In fact, I felt a closer intellectual affinity with other psychiatrists, older, more experienced, more vocal in the discussion of the postcolonial predicaments of disaffiliation and estrangement they recognized in themselves and in their patients, and more influenced by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches. But this is a story of generations and not only therapeutic praxis.
I came to know Dr. A. better when two years later he asked me to help him with his mémoire in psychiatry, the thesis medical students have to present at the end of their residency. Dr. A. intended to write on the question of culture, religion, and psychiatric care, and as we discussed together I realized that his way of relating to the cultural referent was different from what I had encountered and reflected upon in my work with other, more senior psychiatrists, or psychiatrists trained in France.
Some psychiatrists interrogated their praxis with patients in their own clinic, reflecting on their attempt to grasp, beyond the medical configuration of a symptom, the sense of a life and its disappearance; their own complex relation to the institution vis- à- vis the “mystery” of the patients, as well as the hesitancies and uncertainties of their own diagnostic acts. For others, the dominant sentiment was the melancholic recognition of a loss, and an attachment that made itself felt like a wound. Psychiatrists such as Dr. N. or Dr. M. (as I discuss in part 1) were led to pose the question of culture and disaffiliation at an existential, psychodynamic, and sociopolitical level, and in relation to their own autobiographical trajectories.
For Dr. N., whose consultations I shared for many months, there was only his daily and singular encounter with patients, patients from poor urban and rural areas, who spoke Arabic or Berber and came to the hospital as a last resort. Patients for whom he and others struggled to find free medications and to whom he occasionally even gave money for transportation. A sense of painful renunciation of public voice, and a choice to occupy the institutional margins, in the ethics of a solitary clinical practice; a choice that pointed to the institutional failure to address the question of patients’ experience, inequalities, voice, translation. Dr. M. spoke of his daily struggle with himself to follow his patient as far as he could on the territory of strangeness, postponing his diagnostic act, through religious and cultural territories, and as long as things were not so strange for him that he had to stop. Dr. N. and Dr. M. were my interlocutors of choice (it is Dr. M. who introduced me to thinking the hospital through Winnicott), with whom I felt I could connect and share my observations and questions, from whom I knew I could learn, and with whom I wanted to write in dialogue. There were others whose attitude towards the “cassure” of the past— the interruption of cultural transmission— was more pragmatic: the colonial history being what it was, the practices and discourse of institutional psychiatry were their legacy, and psychiatrists had no choice but live with them.
“Psychiatry is in French,” Dr. K., a senior psychiatrist told me one day (he was then the head of the female ward, and the one who originally talked to me about writing Foucault’s history of madness in Morocco) when I was asking him about the experience of listening to patients in the emergency room, where the residents doing their shifts had no choice but to speak colloquial Arabic, Berber when they could, or to bring in a nurse who could translate from Berber when needed; and yet they were taking their notes in French, because the language of their medical training, of staff meetings and hospital files, was French. He paused. To himself perhaps, just as to me, his words resounded with strident irony. Was it an indictment of the colonial “white mythology” in the sense of Fanon? In Martinique, Fanon wrote, the French language became the bearer and the signifier of subjugation and loss, woven with the phantasies and torments of perverse enjoyment. Or was it a tacit assent and ultimately a passive endorsement of the postcolonial symbolic? For this reason, he continued, for a psychiatrist such as himself, it was easier to work with patients from the Westernized elites, whose language for the symptom, configuration of thinking and imagining, was not incommensurable with the language of modern medical and psychological science. Psychiatry was French: “parler une langue c’est assumer un monde, une culture” (to speak a language is to take on a world and a culture). Where did this leave the large majority of patients at the hospital?
. . . .
Dr. A. belonged to a new generation of medical students and young professionals that was imperceptibly but decidedly shifting the practice of medicine and the terms of debate, in an international style and reach. He had in this sense something in common with Saad Eddine El- Othmani— a psychiatrist who in 2003 became the head of the Islamic Party of Justice and Development (PJD, ʿAdl wa Tanmiya), and who alongside with his specialization in psychiatry completed a degree in Islamic jurisprudence at the institution of high religious learning in Morocco.
Dr. A. and the Imam had several patients in common, who had at one time or another undergone hospitalization or come for outpatient consultation at the hospital. The Imam did not exclude the possibility of a collaboration of ethical- religious and scientific competencies. In conversation with Dr. A. he argued for the complementarity of al- ʿulama sharʿiyyūn and al- aṭibbāʾ ṭabīʿiyyūn (“scholars of religious law” and “physicians of natural law”), and opposed both to what he called the “false healers,” merchants of falsehood in the service of Shayṭan. For, inasmuch as nature is a part of creation, science is not external to the oneness of God. It is the jinn and the “false healers” who traffic in unnatural matters; their acts are a violation against God and the created cosmos. As Ibn Qayyim stated in his fourteenth- century medical treatise, and as the Imam argues and practices in his healing sessions with patients and in his preparation and administration of herbal remedies, there are natural (ṭabīʿī) and spiritual (rūḥī) remedies, and treatment consists in a combination of the two.
But the boundary of the demonic and the organic is blurred. This is why the Imam was interested in exchanging knowledge and reflection with Dr. A.— to better distinguish illnesses caused directly or indirectly by the jinn from situations where the illness was instead caused by a neurological problem, or by chronic substance abuse (al- mukhaḍḍarāt)— the two major causes of natural mental illness in the eyes of the Imam. As he explained in one of our first conversations, the brain (al- dimāgh) is the principal localization of the jinn in the body, inasmuch as the brain “is the center of perception (al- shuʿūr) and feeling (al- iḥsās).”
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Islam and World History: The Ventures of Marshall Hodgson
Edited by Edmund Burke III and Robert J Mankin
About the Book
Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies and provided an alternative approach to world history. Edited by Edmund Burke III and Robert Mankin, Islam and World History explores the complexity of Hodgson’s thought, the daring of his ideas, and the global context of his world historical insights into, among other themes, Islam and world history, gender in Islam, and the problem of Muslim universality.
In our post-September 11 world, Hodgson’s historical vision and moral engagement have never been more relevant. A towering achievement, Islam and World History will prove to be the definitive statement on Hodgson’s relevance in the twenty-first century and will introduce his influential work to a new generation of readers.
About the Editors
Edmund Burke III is professor emeritus, research professor of history, and the director of the Center for World History at UC-Santa Cruz.
Robert J. Mankin (1952–2017) was director of Anglophone studies at the Université Paris Diderot (Paris VII) in France.
Scholarly Praise for Islam and World History
“In our age of Islamophobia and renewed racialist and religious nationalisms, nothing could be more important than Marshall Hodgson’s humanist and universalist vision, exemplified in his Venture of Islam. These essential essays on Hodgson stand as almost unique in exploring the life and thought of a major American thinker on Islam and Muslim civilization, and they will be indispensable to anyone concerned with world history.”–Juan Cole, University of Michigan
“Burke has done more than any other scholar to preserve and project the legacy of Hodgson as both Islamic and world historian over the decades. This new collection of essays will add to the luster of Hodgson’s earlier volumes, sparking renewed interest and intense debate about the nature of his stature as a global historian of the Islamic world.”–Bruce Lawrence, Duke University
Additional Information
November 2018
192 pages
$27.50 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780226584645
Paper ISBN: 9780226584782
Digital ISBN: 9780226584812
Where to Purchase
The University of Chicago Press
Excerpt
From Chapter 1: “The Ventures of Marshall G. S. Hodgson”; Pages 1-3 , 6
To engage with Hodgson’s thought is to apprehend the world of Islam through different spectacles. When it appeared in 1974, Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization was recognized as a major achievement. For the first time an American historian cast Islam in a world-historical frame and simultaneously asserted its moral vision. In doing so, Hodgson proposed a radical response to the persistent cultural biases that had stunted the growth of the Islamic studies field. For him Islam was not “other”; it was a venture alongside others that marked human efforts to bring about a just and moral world.
At present, the very idea of Islam as a monotheistic religion with a moral vision is impossible for most people to imagine. So too is the thought that the history of Islamic civilization is primarily the history of the Arabs. (In fact, fully 80 percent of world Muslims do not speak Arabic.) Although many people are aware that not all Muslims are Sunni, few know that 10–13 percent are adherents of the Shiʿa branch. Hodgson believed that rather than being of little consequence, these internal differences played a vital role in shaping how Islamic civilization unfolded.
This had several consequences for Hodgson. First, to “get Islam right,” it was necessary to rethink its place in the larger context of human history. Far from having an autonomous history, Islamic civilization is deeply embedded in the history of the rest of human society. Second, there would need to be a fundamental rethinking of the concept of civilization. Civilizations for Hodgson were not autonomous, culturally defined, and changeless spaces. Rather, they had had historically complex and often conflicting relationships internally as well as with their neighbors.
Changing our conception of civilization meant reinventing world history as well. Hodgson also had to reshape the field of world history. His world history began with the notion of the interconnectedness of societies in history and the indivisibility of human experience. From this perspective, the ascendancy of the West was not predetermined by its alleged moral and technological superiority, but drew upon the cumulative interaction of humans across Afro-Eurasia throughout history. Hodgson’s humanistic conscience and commitment to a nonracialist, nonteleological world history based upon the brotherhood of all humans provide a powerful argument against epistemological nihilists and moral agnostics.
Islam and World History: The Ventures of Marshall Hodgson brings together essays by American, European, and international scholars concerned with both the intellectual legacy and the enduring relevance of Hodgson’s vision. The time is ripe for a Hodgson revival. The world of Islam is vast (1.6 billion persons) and complex beyond the imaginings of most Americans; Hodgson’s world-historical vision and moral engagement have never been more relevant. As the first volume of critical essays on this important world historian and historian of Islam, this collection aims to bring Hodgson’s legacy into the twenty-first century.
Hodgson differed from most other academics of the 1950s and 1960s in that his writings were informed by his radical Quaker consciousness. A conscientious objector to World War II who was interned by the US government, Hodgson was profoundly challenged by the war and its aftermath. The political and moral desolation of the post–World War II era energized him as it did few others. A kerygmatic preacher, he sought to forge a humanistic pedagogy that would change how students/readers thought about cultural others in relation to themselves. The expression of that pedagogy was The Venture of Islam.
The revolutionary cosmopolitanism of Hodgson’s ideas has brought him the attention of a growing number of readers over the last several decades. This is because of his exacting intellect, as well as his insistence that we locate the history of Islam in the context of other world civilizations. In a present moment dominated by political and moral obtuseness, the breadth of Hodgson’s historical vision and his commitment to moral clarity speak across the years to the post-9/11 reader and scholar, whatever her or his specialization.
When he died in 1968, Hodgson was on the verge of a major career as the author of an important monograph, a promising start on a third book, and more than a dozen articles. Instead, he is primarily known for his three-volume history of Islamic civilization, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, an undergraduate textbook. (As a thought experiment, think of another major scholar whose name is principally associated with a textbook.)
Why does Hodgson continue to have an important claim on our attention? For convenience’s sake, it makes sense to think of Hodgson’s thought as having four major aspects. These were Hodgson the orientalist, Hodgson the creator of Islamic studies, Hodgson the world historian, and Hodgson the preacher and pedagogue (the kerygmatic Hodgson). Let’s briefly consider each of the four avatars of Hodgson, before turning to the essays collected in this book. In this way, we can begin to understand some of the reasons why his work remains current even at fifty years’ distance.
. . .
In the early 1960s the history of Islam was deeply bound to the dominant Eurocentric narrative, which saw modernity as quintessentially Western and the history of other civilizations (including Islam) as faded glories. As well, professional historians tended to view world history as a deeply problematic enterprise, best exemplified by the woolly-minded metaphysical concerns of Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. Hodgson’s vision led him to drastically recast much of the then-existing chronological framework by inserting Islam into a global context.
The difference, as Moroccan historian Abdesselam Cheddadi insists in his contribution to this volume, could not be greater. Compare for example the title of the first chapter of Venture (“The World before Islam”) to that of many of the competing textbooks (“Arabia before Muhammad”). Right away the reader is projected into a global narrative, a history in which Islamic civilization is but one civilization among many.
Cheddadi argues that Hodgson’s contribution depended upon devising a new conceptual framework for both Islamic history and world history. To understand how revolutionary Hodgson’s contributions to both fields were in their own time, Cheddadi suggests, we need to understand that neither would have been possible without the other. He begins by reminding us of the state of both fields at the end of World War II.
The task that Hodgson confronted, Cheddadi avows, was enormous. He had to disengage Islamic history from its orientalist tradition and narrow philological biases while simultaneously devising a conceptually more appropriate framework for world history in which Europe would be viewed as but one of a number of major world civilizations. Only by performing both operations simultaneously would it be possible to relocate the history of modernity within the entire history of humankind and thereby to reevaluate the role of Islamic civilization.
Hodgson’s Quaker belief in the unity of humankind and his dissatisfaction with the state of the intellectual field led him to a basic insight: that modernity was a global process that affected all parts of the world at the same time, but to different degrees. The implications of this insight were considerable. Without the cumulative history of the entire Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene (hereafter I use its more familiar English form, ecumene) the transformation of the West would have been impossible. Modernity, Hodgson notes, could have happened elsewhere than in the West. And that it first occurred in the West was freighted with enormous consequences. Recognizing this “double enterprise,” as Cheddadi calls it, is Hodgson’s great achievement. In many respects we have still not caught up with him.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Also new from The University of Chicago Press:
Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921
By Daniel Foliard
About the Book
While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era.
Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.
About the Author
Daniel Foliard is a lecturer at Paris Ouest University.
Praise for Dislocating the Orient
"Foliard offers an exhaustive account of British cartographic knowledge of the region before border incisions were made during and immediately after the First World War. This is a rich and valuable contribution to the body of work on Orientalism, and one that reflects the deep-rooted anxiety that lay at the heart of the imperial project. As an account of imperfect knowledge mixed with hubris, it is also devastating proof that fragility of information was not an obstacle to imperialist ambitions."–Times Literary Supplement
"The great achievement of the first third of Foliard’s book is to describe the various British attempts in the mid-19th century to represent the region visually by means of maps and surveys, and to give an account of the diverse motivations for this. Some were inspired by the biblical or classical past, others by the hope of settlement and economic development. But Foliard’s main point is that there was no system to this, and that it would be wrong-headed to see it in terms of an imperial plan. In particular he shows that the different government departments in London and India had their own quite different reasons for surveying the lands and seas of the region."–London Review of Books
"Foliard has written an exceptional and important book for historians of cartography, scholars of the Middle East and military-studies researchers."–Imago Mundi
Additional Information
April 2017
320 pages
$60.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780226451336
Digital ISBN: 9780226451473
Where to Purchase
The University of Chicago Press
Excerpt
From the introduction, pages 1-3
Divisions of the globe are evolving constructs. Their denominations sometimes tell us more about the imaginations and ideologies of those who devise and demarcate them than about the territories and populations they encompass. Some regional entities are more problematic than others. They raise more questions, trigger more debates. One in particular, the Middle East, became instrumental in how people in Europe and America viewed the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. This book investigates the origins of this specific geographical entity.
The “Middle East” was initially conceived as a way of delineating the transitional space between Europe and India, a region that the originators of the concept wished to see under the influence of the British Empire. Though the dismantling of that empire after the Second World War should have led to the concept’s obsolescence, it acquired a life of its own during the Cold War. While these 20th- century conflicting visions and uses of the “Middle East” are well documented, the genesis of the term has attracted much less attention. Studies consistently devote their attention to the evolution of the concept after the First World War rather than considering its earlier origins. This volume sets out to explore the genealogy and prehistory of this geographical topos. It is an attempt at what Marc Bloch called retrogressive history. The “Middle East” has to be seen as an emerging notion, the culmination of, rather than the starting point in, a process of conceptual coalescence.
One of the greatest potential defects of retrospective analysis is determinism. It is fatally easy to imagine a coherence when there was none, or induce a linear scientific progress where what was actually at stake was a messy process. I therefore choose deliberately not to use the expression “Middle East” in sections dealing with pre- 1900 documentation. In analyzing the origins of the use of that term it is crucially important to contextualize it alongside other usages rather than anachronistically concentrating on the one phrase which happens to interest us. That means following the grain of 19th- century conceptual divisions rather than resisting them. There were, of course, precursors of what would become referred to as the “Middle East” in the early 20th century.
Nineteenth- century cartographers and geographers felt a need for subdivisions of Asia which would take into account the area located between the Mediterranean and India. James Wyld published, for instance, a remarkable map of the Countries lying between Turkey & Birmah, which placed Persia and the Arabian Sea at the very heart of a growing imperial network of communications. Older maps, such as Jean- Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s Première Partie de la Carte d’Asie, already prefigured a transitional area between the Levant and India in the 18th century. Yet, while the “Middle East” was not invented ex nihilo, to impose it as a post facto analytical schema upon 19th- century documentation would ineluctably distort the analysis of it.
I will therefore refer to an ill- defined East and no less approximate Orient in the early chapters of this book. Semantic vagueness is intentional in this instance. It is not at odds with 19th- century usages of both concepts. Their meaning was often context specific and, as Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen have shown, the scope of the “Orient” or the “East” varied over time. The malleable nature of these categories is illustrated by the widely varying definitions adopted by writers in the 19th century. The “East” often referred to the eastern Mediterranean and its adjoining territories. The education of the Victorian elite rested a good deal on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That work conditioned its 19th- century readers to see the “East” as the eastern Roman Empire and its immediate neighbors. So, for example, John Carne’s use of the term in his 1830 travelogue included Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, and that denomination was a commonplace among his contemporaries. This minimalist East was also, among other things, the geographical reflection of the Grand Tour. The 1862 Prince of Wales’s educational journey to the “East” was in fact a trip to Cairo and Constantinople, not to India. Decades later, the East could refer to Russia and Turkey in Europe for Henry de Worms, who became undersecretary of state for the colonies in 1888. For Valentine Baker, one of the Great Game heroes, the East went as far as Central Asia. George Curzon eventually subdivided the area into three sections in 1894: the Far East, the Central East, and the Near East. The same volatility characterized uses of the “Orient,” which, as noted by Lewis and Wigen, had a “cultural connotation” in contrast with a more geopolitical “East.” Indeed, “East” and “Orient” were often used interchangeably. Both terms should be viewed in this book through this 19th- century prism, since it will use “Orient” and “East” in their various fluid Victorian denotations, to mean the region from the eastern Mediterranean to the confines of Persia and from the Arabian Sea to the Black Sea.
I have selected various maps to introduce each chapter of this book. They serve two purposes. First, they offer a guide to the reader as to the evolving conceptual historical geography of this region. Second, they should be approached as test cases for understanding how maps were, from their genesis to their usage, a set of “unfolding practices.” These are microstudies, revealing the larger forces at stake in the exploration and construction of the area. They add up to an informal atlas, one that focuses on some of the more significant features of the British relationship with the area. These interconnected case studies and the title of the book indicate that the focus of this work is on one category of documentation in particular: maps. Even if the Middle East is often regarded as a political entity rather than a truly geographical one, maps represent points of entry through which to investigate these cultural constructs. Their elaboration, compilation, semiotics, publication, and reception furnish a set of clues by which we can set about exploring the various social groups, networks, and British imaginations whose preconceptions they document. Besides, maps do not exist in a vacuum. They are the product of an “assemblage of people and of discursive practices.” Studying how they interact with other forms of knowledge as well as how they articulate with textual material is central to understanding them. The book therefore focuses on the actual processes of cartography, that is, the manner in which the British visualized the Middle East through literal mapping and how maps were made. But, in so doing, it is also about the mapping going on in the mind.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com