The World of Islam: Faith, People, Culture

by Bernard Lewis, Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar

In spite if its astonishing impact upon the modern world, the civilization of Islam is still Terra Incognita for many in the West. The thirteen contributors to this volume, all eminent specialists, aim to remedy that situation. Islam itself, and the peoples who accepted it, come first in the story.

Genres: History, Islam, Religion, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Bernard Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of many critially acclaimed and bestselling books, including two number one New York Times bestsellers: What Went Wrong? and Crisis of Islam. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Internationally recognized as the greatest historian of the Middle East, he received fifteen honorary doctorates and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The World of Islam was first published in 1976 and is a collection of essays by various experts in some aspect of Islamic history or culture. It strikes me as a college textbook that would be used in a university survey class like "Islamic Society: Then and Now." It has a fairly dry and academic flavor, so unless you are really interested in this subject matter, I would not advise reading it as your first exposure to Islamic history. That being said, I am fairly interested in this topic so I found the material quite engaging. There are thirteen sections to this book; I will highlight the ones I enjoyed most.

*Cities and Citizens: The Growth and Culture of Urban Islam. Author: Oleg Grabar. This section discussed the similarities and differences of various major urban centers in the classical Islamic world, such as Cairo, Jerusalem, Fez, Aleppo, Baghdad, and Mosul. Discussion of the layout of these cities, the relationship between the government and merchant classes, architecture, etc.

*Jewelers With Words: The Heritage of Islamic Literature. Author: Charles Pellat. A nice summary of the the development of Arabic, Persian, and Indian poetry and literature over the centuries in the Islamic context. Use of classical Arabic for poetry and literature vs common Arabic for day to day living. I enjoyed reading about the romance of Layla and Majnun. This was the most popular romance story during the golden age of Islam. It was transmitted from Arabia to Persia to India. Layla is the beautiful daughter of a powerful shaykh; Majnun is hopelessly in love with her. Layla is forced to marry a man she does not love. Majnun is driven mad by his love for Layla and wanders the hills and deserts writing love poetry. After a while Majnun's father gets tired of his distraught son and forces him to complete the Hajj to Mecca so that he can pray to be rid of his love for Layla. While standing before the Kaaba in Mecca, Majnun prays earnestly that his love for Layla would be increased.

*The Scientific Enterprise: Islamic Contributions to the Development of Science. Author: A.I. Sabra. I am sure everyone reading this review knows about the role that Islam played in preserving ancient Greek scientific knowledge and aggregating Indian mathematics which was later transmitted to Renaissance Europe. You may also remember that during the golden age of Islam astronomy and new forms of mathematics (e.g. Algebra or al-jabr) were advanced in such urban centers as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. I was however completely ignorant of the advances made by Ibn al-Haytham in this ground breaking book Optics. The ancient Greeks such as Plato and Galen thought that your eyes sent out rays that bounced back as images to your brain. Ibn al-Haytham in 11th century Cairo using Euclidian geometry and some good assumptions came up with the intromission hypothesis on how light enters the eye and projects an image on the back of the eyeball.

*Land of the Lion and the Sun: The Flowering of Iranian Civilization. Author: Roger Savory.
This section was on the history of Iran, the development of the Shia branch of Islam, establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Persia. It was an excellent summary on a topic that I knew little about.

*The Mystic Path: The Sufi Tradition. Author: Fritz Meier. It turns out Sufism was a big deal in the classical Islamic world. Sufism, a form of metaphysics where Muslims attempt to find truth and divine love from direct communion with God. It was often called the "inner science." There were whole schools, orders, and leagues of Sufi adherents in the major metropolitan centers of Islam. It seems that Sufism was especially strong in Persia, Turkey, and India. For some excellent Persian Sufi poetry you should check out Rumi . One of it's greatest adherents was al-Ghazali who claimed that true knowledge only comes from a mystical connection to the divine mind and wrote a very influential book condemning Aristotelian philosophy in the Muslim faith, called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes), an expert commentator on Aristotle (and not a Sufi) residing in Cordoba in the Alhohad Caliphate wrote a rebuttal book to al-Ghazali called Incoherence of the Incoherence. For a great lecture on the the two sides of this debate between al-Ghazali and Averroes check out this lecture on YOUTUBE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbRdu.... It is by Professor Wes Cecil and is called "Forgotten Thinkers: Al-Ghazali and Averroes".

So friends, there you have it. If this review was a little dry and/or too academic, I completely blame the source material. Cheers!