Download PDF | Andrew Rippin - The Islamic World, Routledge_ Ashgate, 2008.

Download PDF | [Routledge Worlds] Andrew Rippin - The Islamic World, Routledge_ Ashgate, 2008.

700 Pages 

THE ISLAMIC WORLD 

The Islamic World is an outstanding guide to Islamic faith and culture in all its geographical and historical diversity. Written by a distinguished international team of Islamic scholars, it elucidates the history, philosophy and practice of one of the world’s great religious traditions. Its grounding in contemporary scholarship makes it an ideal reference source for students and scholars alike. Edited by Andrew Rippin, a leading scholar of Islam, the volume covers the political, geographical, religious, intellectual, cultural and social worlds of Islam, and offers insight into all aspects of Muslim life including the Qur
an and law, philosophy, science and technology, art, literature, and film and much else. It explores the concept of an ‘Islamic’ world: what makes it distinctive and how uniform is that distinctiveness across Muslim geographical regions and through history? 

Andrew Rippin is Professor of Islamic History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria, Canada, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications include Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (third edition Routledge 2005) and The Qur
an and its Interpretative Tradition (2001).

CONTRIBUTORS 

Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations, The American University, Washington DC. He has held senior administrative positions in Pakistan, and was the Pakistan High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the UK, and is author of Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings Press, 2007). He is the author of many other books and articles, and a frequent commentator on Islamic affairs in the media. 

Kecia Ali is Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University. Her primary research interests center on marriage in early Islamic jurisprudence but she is also interested in modern appropriations of classical texts. She is the author of Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur
an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oneworld, 2006), and co-author of Islam: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2008). She is currently working on a biography of the jurist al-Sha¯fi
ı¯. John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies problems of pluralism, law, and religion, and in particular contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and law in Asia, Europe, and North America. He has written on Asia in Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003), and his Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007) concerns current debates in France on Islam and laïcité. Forthcoming are Shaping French Islam (Princeton) and The New Anthropology of Islam (Cambridge). 

Christopher Buck is author of Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (Kalimat, 2005), Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Bahá
í Faith (SUNY Press, 1999), Symbol and Secret: Qur
an Commentary in Bahá
u
lláh’s Kitáb-i Íqán (Kalimat, 1995/2004), and a chapter in The Blackwell Companion to the Qur
a¯n (Blackwell, 2006). He is a Pennsylvania attorney and independent scholar (Ph.D. 1996; JD 2006), having formerly taught at Michigan State University (2000–4), Quincy University (1999–2000), Millikin University (1997–9), and Carleton University (1994–6), where he variously taught American Studies, African American Studies, Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, Argument Theory and Research Writing. Art Buehler is Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is a scholar of the phenomenon of transregional S.u¯fı¯ networks and the transmission of Islamic revivalist ideas, and is senior editor of the Journal of the History of Sufism. His two books Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) and Analytical Indexes for the Collected Letters of Ahmad Sirhindi [in Persian] (Iqbal Academy, 2001) are the result of four years of fieldwork in IndoPakistan. Martin Bunton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, Canada. His book, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917–1936 was published by Oxford University Press in 2007, and he is currently working on a comparison of government land policies in Middle East territories under British rule in the interwar period.

 Jeffrey C. Burke is Visiting Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, and has published book chapters, articles, and reviews in leading scholarly works with a focus on women in religious traditions, the history of Islam, and Muslim–Christian relations. Amila Buturovic is Associate Professor of Humanities and the Noor Fellow in Islamic Studies at York University, Toronto. She holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from McGill University where she specialized in medieval Arabic literature and thought. Her main research interests lie in the intersections between literature and religion, especially in the context of identity formation in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans. In addition to many articles, she is the author of Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombstones, Landscape and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (Palgrave, 2002) and, with Irvin C. Schick, co-editor of Women in the Ottoman Balkans (I. B. Tauris, 2007). Her current research focuses on Muslim funerary inscriptions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Simonetta Calderini is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Roehampton University, London. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies from SOAS, University of London, and her first degree in Oriental Languages and Civilizations from the Oriental Institute, Naples, Italy. She has written a number of books, among which, with Delia Cortese, is Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Her works on the topics of tafsı¯r, gender studies, contemporary Islam as well as Medieval Ismailism, appear as articles in academic journals and entries in various Atlases and Encyclopedias. Her current research focuses on classical and modern arguments for and against women ima¯ ms. Niall Christie teaches History, Art and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia and Corpus Christi College, Vancouver. He has published articles on a variety of subjects, including in particular the Muslim response to the crusades and comparisons of holy war preaching in Islam and Christianity. He is currently co-authoring a book on the latter topic. Elton L. Daniel is a Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin and has conducted research in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. He has served as associate editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica and published many books and articles pertaining to Iran, including Khurasan under Abbasid Rule (Bibliotheca Islamica, 1979), AShi’ite Pilgrimage to Mecca 1885–1886 (University of Texas Press, 1990), and The History of Iran (Greenwood, 2001). Devin DeWeese is Professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University specializing in the religious history of Islamic Central Asia. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) and a number of articles on the history of S.u¯fı¯ communities in Central Asia and on the historical process and mythic poetics of Islamization. 

Gönül Dönmez-Colin is an independent writer and researcher. She graduated from the American College in Istanbul and the University of Istanbul, Department of Philology and completed her post-graduate studies at the Concordia and McGill Universities in Montreal, Canada. She has taught in Montreal and Hong Kong and has done field research in Iran, Turkey, India and Central Asia. Among her recent books are Women, Islam and Cinema (Reaktion Books, 2004), Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Filmmakers from the Middle East and Central Asia (Intellect, 2006), Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East (ed.) (Wallflower Press, 2007) and Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (Reaktion Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into nine languages. Markus Dressler received his Ph.D. from Erfurt University in 2001 and since 2005 he has been an Assistant Professor at Hofstra University. His research focus is on the religion, politics, and history of modern Turkey with a special interest in Turkish Alevism. His monographs include Die civil Religion der Türkei. Kemalistische und alevitische Atatürk-Rezeption im Vergleich (Würzburg 1999) and Die alevitische Religion. Traditionslinien und Neubestimmungen (Würzburg 2002). He has also written articles and book chapters mainly on Turkish Alevism, religion and politics in Turkey, and on contemporary Sufism. Michael Frishkopf is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Alberta. He received his doctorate from UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology in 1999. He has conducted fieldwork primarily in Egypt, and in Ghana. His research and teaching center on Sufi music, sound in Islamic ritual, and the musical traditions of the Arab world and West Africa. Recent articles and book chapters include “Globalization and re-localization of Sufi music in the West” (Routledge), “Nationalism, Nationalization, and the Egyptian music industry” (Asian Music), and “Mediated Qur
anic recitation and the contestation of Islam in contemporary Egypt” (Ashgate). Three books are in progress: The Sounds of Islam (Routledge), Sufism, Ritual, and Modernity in Egypt: Language Performance as an Adaptive Strategy (Brill) and an edited collection entitled Music and Media in the Arab World. Robert Gleave, who received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, University of Manchester, in 1996, is Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter. He has published extensively on Shiism, focusing on Twelver Shı¯ı¯ legal hermeneutics. He has strong research interests in Islamic Law, in particular the development of Twelver Shı¯ı¯ legal thought, as well as the relationship between theory and practice in Islamic Law, medieval and modern Islamic political theory and the legitimization of violence in Muslim legal works. He is the author of Inevitable Doubt: Two Theories of Shı¯ ı¯ Jurisprudence (Brill, 2000) and editor of Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). More recent works include Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari School of Imami Shi ism (Brill, 2007), and Islam and Literalism: A Study of Literal Meaning in Early Muslim Legal Theory (forthcoming). Frank Griffel is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Yale University. He has published Shari a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context, ed. Frank Griffel and Abbas Amanat (Stanford University Press 2007), Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam. Die Entwicklung zu al-Gazalis Urteil gegen die Philosophie und die Reaktionen der Philosophen (Brill, 2000), and translated, introduced, and annotated Über Rechtgläubigkeit und religiöse Toleranz. Eine Übersetzung der Schrift Das Kriterium der Unterscheidung zwischen Islam und Gottlosigkeit (Faysal at-tafriqa bayna l-Islam wa-z-zandaqa) (Spur Verlag, 1998). Paul L. Heck is assistant professor of Islamic Studies in Georgetown University’s Theology Department. He is author of The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization (Brill, 2002) and editor of Sufism and Politics (Markus Wiener, 2006). His articles treat varied topics, including concepts of jiha¯d, the rise of early Kharijism, political thought in Islam, and the role of skepticism in Islam’s intellectual heritage. Marcia K. Hermansen is professor in the Theology department and Director of the Islamic World Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. Her translation of Sha¯h Walı¯ Alla¯h’s, H. ujjat Alla¯h al-Ba¯ligha, The Conclusive Argument from God, was published by Brill in 1996 and in subsequent Pakistani and Indian editions. She was co-editor of the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (2003) and is currently writing American Sufis for Oxford University Press. She has contributed numerous scholarly articles on topics such as contemporary Islamic thought, Islam in South Asia, Sufism, Muslims in America, and women and gender in Islam. Valerie J. Hoffman received her Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Chicago in 1986, and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches on all aspects of Islam. She has published Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt (University of South Carolina Press, 1995) and a second book, The Essentials of Ibadi Islam, is forthcoming with Syracuse University Press. She has also published many articles on various aspects of Islam and made a film for classroom use, “Celebrating the Prophet in the Remembrance of God: Sufi Dhikr in Egypt” (1997). Her current research is on Muslim scholars in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Oman and East Africa. Amir Hussain is Associate Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He specializes in the study of contemporary Muslim communities in North America. His latest book is Oil and Water: Two Faiths, One God (Copper House, 2006), an introduction to Islam for a North American audience. He has published about Muslims in journals such as Studies in Religion, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He is on the editorial boards of two journals, Comparative Islamic Studies and Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life 

Zayn Kassam is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Pomona College, Claremont, California. She has been honored with two Wig Awards for Distinguished Teaching at Pomona College, as well as an American Academy of Religion Excellence in Teaching Award, and has lectured widely on gender issues in the USA, Canada, and Britain. She is the author of the volume on Islam in a series titled Introduction to the World’s Major Religions published by Greenwood Press (2006), and has published articles on women in Islam, on Islam and violence, and on teaching Islam. Hussein Keshani is an Assistant Professor of Art History at University of British Columbia-Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada, where he teaches courses in European, Contemporary and Islamic Art. His research focuses on the architectural history of Islamic India during the Sultanate (twelfth to fifteenth century) and late Mughal periods (eighteenth to nineteenth century). Oliver Leaman teaches at the University of Kentucky and writes on Islamic and Jewish philosophy. His most recent publication is Islam: The Key Concepts, with Kecia Ali (Routledge, 2008). He has written and edited a number of previous books and works of reference in the areas of Islamic and Jewish thought and culture, including Jewish Thought (Routledge, 2006) and Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Michael Lecker is a Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Among his recent publications are The “Constitution of Medina”: Muhammad’s First Legal Document (Darwin Press, 2004) and People, Tribes and Society in Arabia around the Time of Muhammad (Aldershot, 2005). Recently he has worked on prosopography. A demo of his project may be seen at http://micro5.mscc.huji.ac.il:81/JPP/demo; username: jpp-demo; password: guest. His homepage is: http://michael-lecker.net. James E. Lindsay is Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University. He is the author of Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World (Greenwood, 2005) and the editor of Ibn Asakir and Early Islamic History (Darwin Press, 2001). He is the author of several articles on Ibn Asa¯kir (d. 1176) and his Ta
rı¯kh madı¯nat Dimashq. He is currently working on “Fight in the Path of God”: Ibn Asa¯kir of Damascus and His Contribution to the Jiha¯d Campaign of Sultan Nu¯r al-Dı¯n, coauthored with Suleiman A. Mourad to be published by Ashgate in the “Crusade Texts in Translation” series. Ebrahim Moosa is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion and Director of the Center for Study of Muslim Networks at Duke University. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism (Oneworld, 2000). Previously he taught at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Religious Studies in his native South Africa till 1998 and was Visiting Professor at Stanford University prior to joining Duke in 2001. Suleiman Ali Mourad received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2004 and is Associate medieval Islamic history and religious thought, including the Mutazilite school’s approach and method in Qur
anic exegesis, the presentation of Jesus in the Qur
a¯n and Islamic scholarship, Muslim reactions to the Crusades, and the holiness of Jerusalem. He is the author of Early Islam between Myth and History: al-H. asan al-Bas.rı¯ (d. 110h/728ce) and the Formation of His Legacy in Classical Islamic Scholarship (Brill, 2005), and co-editor of Jerusalem: Idea and Reality (Routledge, 2008). Gordon Nickel is an Assistant Professor of Intercultural Studies for the ACTS seminary consortium at Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia, Canada. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the earliest commentaries on the Qur
a¯n. He has extensive experience of Muslim communities in Pakistan and India. David Owusu-Ansah is Professor of History at James Madison University in Virginia. He received his master’s degree in Islamic Studies at McGill University and a doctorate in African history from Northwestern University. He has published two editions of the Historical Dictionary of Ghana (Scarecrow Press, 1995 and 2005) and he is also the author of Islamic Talismanic Tradition in Nineteenth Century Asante (Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). He is part of a research project on the modernization of Islamic education in Ghana. Gabriel Said Reynolds is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame (USA). He is the author of A Muslim Theologian in the Sectarian Milieu: Abd al-Jabba¯r and the Critique of Christian Origins (Brill, 2004) and the editor of The Qur
a¯n in Its Historical Context (Routledge, 2008). Currently he is completing a manuscript on the Qur
a¯n’s conversation with Biblical literature, the result of research in Beirut and Jerusalem during 2006–7. Andrew Rippin is Professor of Islamic History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Muslims: their Religious Beliefs and Practices (3rd edition Routledge, 2005) and The Qur
a¯ n and its Interpretative Tradition (Ashgate, 2001); his other works include Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature with Norman Calder and Jawid Mojaddedi (Routledge, 2003). Sajjad H. Rizvi is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. A specialist on Islamic intellectual history, he is the author of Mulla Sadra (Oxford, 2007) and with Feras Hamza of Understanding the Word of God (Oxford, 2008). His current project is a study of Islamic philosophical traditions in India. Amyn B. Sajoo lectured at Simon Fraser University and held visiting appointments at Cambridge and McGill universities before he joined the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London in 2007. He is the author of Muslim Ethics (I. B. Tauris, 2004), and Pluralism in Old Societies and New States (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1994) as well as being the contributing editor of Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination (I. B. Tauris, 2008) and of Civil Society in the Muslim World (I. B. Tauris, 2002). George Saliba is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He studies the developments of Islamic planetary theories and their impact on European astronomy. His publications include Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007) and A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam (New York University Press, 1994). Zeki Saritoprak received his Ph.D. in Islamic Theology from the University of Marmara, Turkey. Currently he is the holder of the Bediüzzaman Said Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to presenting at numerous conferences and universities over the years, Dr. Saritoprak is also the author of several books and academic articles in Turkish, English, and Arabic. Mustafa Shah is a lecturer in the Near and Middle East Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where he completed both his BA and Ph.D. degrees in the field of Arabic linguistics and Islamic Studies. His principal research and teaching interests include early Arabic linguistic thought, classical Islamic theology and jurisprudence, and, Qur
anic hermeneutics and exegesis. He has published articles on these subjects in the Journal of Qur
anic Studies and the Encyclopaedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. He is currently working on a number of monographs including Religious Dogma and the Synthesis of Early Arabic Linguistic Thought (Kegan Paul International, 2008) and Classical Interpretations of the Qur
a¯n (I. B. Tauris, 2008). William Shepard is Associate Professor of Religion Studies (Retired) at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. He completed his Ph.D. degree in the comparative study of religion at Harvard University in 1973 and taught in the USA and then New Zealand from 1971 to 1999. His research has been primarily on Islam in the modern world, particularly the writings of Sayyid Qut.b. David Thomas is Professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham. He specializes in the history and theology of Christian–Muslim relations, and has recently published Muslim–Christian Polemic during the Crusades, the Letter from the People of Cyprus and Ibn Abı¯ T. a¯lib al-Dimashqı¯’s Reply (Brill, 2005), together with R. Ebied, and The Bible in Arab Christianity (Brill, 2007). He is editor of the journal Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations and senior editor of the texts and studies series “The History of Christian–Muslim Relations”. Nelly Van Doorn-Harder holds the Surjit Patheja Chair in World Religions and Ethics at Valparaiso University. Her areas of study include Islam in Indonesia, the Coptic Orthodox Church, Religion and Gender, and Inter-religious Studies. She is the author of Women Shaping Islam. Indonesian Muslim Women Reading the Qur
an (University of Illinois Press, 2006), Contemporary Coptic Nuns (University of South Carolina Press, 1995), and De Koptisch-Orthodoxe Kerk (Kampen, 2005). She has also co-edited Between Desert and City: The Coptic Orthodox Church Today (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1997), and Coping with Evil in Religion and Culture: Case Studies (Editions Ropodi, 2007). David Waines is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, England. Since retirement he has been Visiting Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands, teaching and researching his next book on the fourteenth-century Muslim world. His most recent books are An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2003), and editor of Patterns of Everyday Life (Ashgate, 2002). Earle H. Waugh is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta. He has researched and published widely on the history of religions and Islamic Studies. His most recent book Music, Memory, Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters (University of South Carolina Press, 2005) was short-listed for the prestigious Albert Hourani prize for best book on the Middle East. He is the editor of the journal Religious Studies and Theology and was senior editor of the Gale Encyclopedia of Contemporary Religion (2005). He is also a consultant for many publications and media organizations including the New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Currently he directs a research institute in culture and medicine at the University. Neguin Yavari is Assistant Professor of History at the New School, New York. Her biography of Niz. a¯m al-Mulk is forthcoming. Her most recent article on “Mirror for Princes or a Hall of Mirrors: Niz. a¯m al-Mulk’s Siyar al-mulu¯k Reconsidered,” appeared in al-Masaq. Her “Polysemous Texts and Reductionist Readings: Women and Heresy in the Siyar al-mulu¯k,” appeared in a collected volume of articles coedited by her: Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet (Columbia University Press, 2004).

INTRODUCTION Andrew Rippin 

Within the context of world politics, the Islamic world has taken on a prominence today that can hardly be ignored. In making that simple observation, however, challenging, confusing and misleading terminology is necessarily employed. The precise reference of “the” Islamic world is unclear. The basis upon which that singular category has been created is not immediately evident or sufficiently enunciated. Even if one assumes that the religion of Islam must play a role within the definition of that world, it is immediately apparent there is a problem: it is well known that not everyone in that geographical region is, in fact, Muslim. It is also clear that, even of those who consider themselves Muslims, there are many different manifestations of that faith itself. Further, it may be debated whether the faith itself is, in fact, the defining feature of the interaction of that geographical region with the rest of world. 

The extent to which the realities of contemporary power structures play a role that overwhelms issues that might be thought to be grounded in religious values does, on many occasions, seem evident. To undertake an investigation of what it is that we mean by “the Islamic world,” then, is a task that is both important and complex. The goal of this volume is to provide an overview of the culture of those who maintained, and continue to maintain, adherence to the religion of Islam in all of its geographical and historical diversity. The notion of diversity provides the main focus for the work as it aims by means of its overall contents to approach an answer to the fundamental question of what we mean by the frequently used phrase that constitutes the title of the book, “the Islamic world.” The chapters herein are unified by their common quest for the definition of this phrase. Each essay contributes, through its reflections on its own goal and scope, to the central theme of the volume. Each essay poses the question of what it is within the topic being treated that gives “the Islamic world” meaning and to what extent that meaning is uniform across Muslim-populated countries and through historical eras. The volume in its totality, therefore, attempts to define the topic reflected in the title of the work, while at the same time aiming to provide an authoritative and accessible source of information on topics of relevance, concern and interest. In attempting to achieve the conceptual goal of the volume, however, it has also become apparent that not every possible approach to the overall conception can be explored within the finite contents of the two covers of a book. Compromises are necessary. It should not be thought that there are no other ways of exploring the notion of “the Islamic world.” Indeed, there certainly are further geographical regions to examine, other themes to trace, more concerns to consider. The chapters that make up this book should be thought of as examples only, as explorations of a concept that continues to need to be refined and defined, and as models of scholarly inquiry into topics which truly know no bounds.

Conception The approach to the overall task of this volume has been divided into five parts. Geography is used as the initial organizational category in Part I. Each geographical area reflects modern geo-political boundaries; this draws attention immediately to a basic problem in the concept of “the Islamic world” and the need to pay attention to the variability of the “borders” in medieval and modern times. It can be observed that, at each point in history, there is an underlying question concerning the presence of an Islamic identity in each geographical region. Given that a concept of “Islam” superficially appears to underpin the notion of the Islamic world, Part II covers the fundamentals of the Islamic religion while paying attention to the diversity of thought and manifestation in both history and geography. While Islam is a convenient concept by which to try to define the Islamic world, once again the diversity of its attributes and the features of cultural adaptation do mean that, beyond sharing a limited set of common symbols, the Islamic basis of the Islamic world is a concept which needs to be explored and carefully defined. In Part III the intellectual world, as it manifests itself in thought about the world beyond (but yet including) the religious sphere, provides the theme by which the manifestation of the Islamic world may be understood. The organization of knowledge on both the theoretical and applied levels as enunciated by leading intellectuals from different time periods provides a measure of how the Islamic world both understood itself and created a tradition of cultural knowledge. Here, too, attention to regional and historical variation is crucial in understanding a concept of “the Islamic world.” This part features a sequence of ten biographies of individual Muslims, stretched across time and place to serve as illustrations of the diversity of thought and approach, and also to provide models of biographical treatments in the Islamic context. 

The world is, in the end, composed of individuals whose lives are interwoven with one another; while ten such lives can hardly be said to be a sufficient selection to allow more than the slightest glimpse of the ways in which individuals involve themselves in the concept of Islam, the sense of the commonality of the venture itself does emerge. Material culture is often interpreted to provide tangible evidence of the presence of Islam in the world, and that provides the focus of Part IV. The reality is, however, that this is an aspect which is overwhelming in its diversity across the Islamic world and through history. The various manifestations of art, architecture, urban design, music, and literature throughout Islamic history and across the geographical range centrally raise the question of what makes these manifestations Islamic. Finally, the structuring of society in the context of Islam, founded in Islamic law and finding its expression in a range of historical and geographically conditioned manners, is crucial to providing an understanding of how individual Muslims live their lives as a part of the “Islamic world.” The chapters in Part V display the full depth of the issue of the meaning of “the Islamic world” by dealing with those matters that so deeply inhere in assumptions about day-to-day life involving power in its many social organizational aspects. How individuals create and maintain their own sense of identity as Muslims is embedded in the generally unspoken values that ground human existence. The end result of this compilation of data combined with reflection on the overall definitional theme can hardly be said to point in a single direction. The Islamic world is a dynamic notion, shifting through time, finding its manifestation adjusting to the pressures of the moment. Of course there are symbolic touchstones, especially in the dimensions of human existence we call “religious,” but to no extent do those symbols serve to dictate absolutely and uniformly every aspect of life in every circumstance. Pragmatic interpretation influenced by the exchange of ideas across human cultures has allowed the Islamic world to continue to flourish and adapt.

Realization Bringing together a volume of this type has meant that I have, in my role as editor, encountered many technical issues which have challenged me. The very diversity of the Islamic world creates a complex linguistic universe; the existence of that world over a time period of over 1,400 years defeats any easy notion of cultural uniformity. Dealing with those two facts has meant that I have had to work with a diverse range of authors to contribute to the volume. To deal with these complexities some basic principles related to the technicalities of our discipline have been employed. Many aspects have made me, as the editor, confront the oft-remarked Arabo-centric nature of so many of our studies; yet I needed to find ways to resolve some basic technical issues and the ways to do so were not always obvious to me. So, once again, in order to deal with diversity in the confines of one book, compromises – but sensible ones, I hope – have been necessary. Place names have not been presented in transliteration, generally preferring a common English form of names where such exist. Names of people, on the other hand, are provided in full transliteration except in the case of most contemporary figures where common spelling is used when possible and where such seems to prevail in common practice. Of course, the point at which someone is “contemporary” is difficult to define. To simplify matters, I have used C. E. Bosworth The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) as a source for the spelling of rulers’ names: this may, in some situations, suggest an Arabo-centric vision but better that than having the names of people spelled differently in different chapters as dictated by linguistic context (this has proven most troublesome to me in dealing with Turkish matters). Proper nouns received Anglicizing endings (Qur
anic, for example) have not been transliterated, although, as that example shows, the differentiation between ayn and hamza has been maintained. Bosworth’s The New Islamic Dynasties has also been the source for dates, about which there can certainly be divergence between sources on occasion. Dates are only given in their ce format and not hijrı¯, once again because different time periods and different geographical areas result in a jumble of possible approaches, and they simply needed to be resolved into a single standard to bring uniformity and consistency to this work.

Gratitude The work on this volume has stretched over several years. I must express my thanks to the contributors for their patience and responsiveness. Amy Laurens, Gemma Dunn and Lalle Pursglove, who handled the details of the volume at Routledge, have been remarkably accommodating; the support of Routledge’s Religion editor, Lesley Riddle, has of course been essential.

References In bringing this work together, many of the authors have used essential reference works in the field to which it is worth drawing attention. These are the tools for anyone who hopes who pursue the study of the Islamic world further. The Encyclopaedia of Islam is always referenced here in the version on CD-Rom issued by Brill in Leiden in 2004 and called The Encyclopaedia of Islam I–XII CD-ROM Edition. The encyclopaedia started out in its first edition 1913–36 which was then reprinted in 1987. A new edition emerged between 1960 and 2004 which is the basis of the CD-Rom. 

The Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, first issued in 1953, gathers together articles on religion from the first edition with some updated material. For beginning students issues related to transliteration in the encyclopaedia often create a challenge. The main differences between the Encyclopaedia and this book (and most other scholarly works) are to be seen in the letters represented in this work as “j” (jı¯m) and “q” (qa¯f). For “j” the Encyclopaedia uses “dj,” so, for example, an entry for h. ajj (“pilgrimage”) will be found under h. adjdj, or jiha¯ d (“holy war”) under djiha¯d. For “q,” the Encyclopaedia uses “k” with a subscript dot, thus intertwining the entries with “k” representing the letter ka¯f. The reader must remember that where “q” is found in a word in this book, the Encyclopaedia entry will have a “k.” Examples are qa¯d. ı¯/k. a¯ d. ı¯ (“judge”), t.arı¯qa/t.arı¯k. a (“S.u¯fı¯ brotherhood”) and Qur
a¯n/K. ur
a¯ n. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia started to appear in 2007 and it will avoid some of these problems by using English keywords and a more generally accepted transliteration scheme. 

The Encyclopedia Iranica (Eisenbrauns, 1982 and ongoing) is partially available freely online (www.iranica.com) and is an excellent scholarly resource for topics related to Iran but often with a broader reference. A different transliteration system is employed there too – one more amendable to Persian pronunciation – but some browsing through it will solve most issues. The Encyclopedia of the Qur
a¯ n (Brill, 2000–6) uses English keywords to present a summary of current scholarship on the Qur
a¯n and many related topics, in alphabetical order. The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Culture (Brill, 2003 and ongoing) provides a wide-ranging survey with a significant social-science orientation to its subject; it is organized thematically and by English headings. C. E. Bosworth The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) is, as already mentioned, a useful and ready reference for basic historical facts. Index Islamicus (various publishers since 1958) is a major bibliographical source of periodical and monograph items, available in print and now online, going back in its coverage to the seventeenth century.

Atlas of the Islamic World since 1500 by Francis Robinson (Facts on File, 1982) is an excellent source of maps. Some internet resources are well worth consideration for research purposes, although the polemical and apologetic nature of many sites means some substantial analysis of many sites is compulsory. One good guide is www.uga.edu/islam: maintained by Professor A. Godlas at the University of Georgia, it is by far the best academically oriented site and the place to begin most searches for information. Another useful site is www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/islamsbook.html, the Fordham University Internet History project, with a significant collection of original and secondary source material in their Medieval Sourcebook.

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