Early Islam
Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation, translated by Ahmed Ali. 573 pages, index. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. $19.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-691-07499-2

The ninth printing of Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation, first published in Pakistan in 1984, comes with revisions made by the translator in 1993, a year before his death. The work is indeed one of the finest renditions of the meaning of the Qur’an, and merits the wonderful reviews that are printed on the back cover. The footnotes are extremely helpful, and explain, in most cases, Ali’s departure from the traditional translations.

The work is, however, not devoid of drawbacks. In his preface, Ali claims: “this is, strictly speaking, a translation, not an interpretation, theological or otherwise” (p. 8). A thorough analysis of the work shows that this statement is not entirely true: the translator has an agenda that he struggles to fulfill by rendering commentary as text. As a believer, he seeks to divest the Qur’an of any report that may seem far-fetched, and, in the process, denies certain Biblical, midrashic, and Talmudic antecedents. In dealing, for example, with the Qur’anic version of Moses’s anger at the Jews for worshipping the golden calf, he translates the f’aqtulu anfusakum of Q2:54 as “kill your pride” (p. 17). He gives no reason for departing from the literal “kill yourselves,” a rendering that would be in agreement with Exodus 32:27. Ali translates Wa rafa’naa fawqakum al tur (Q 2:63) as “we…exalted you on the Mount” (p. 18). The Arabic construction does not allow for this version, and seems to follow the Talmudic explanation of Exodus 19:17 which, according to Rav Avdimi, means that God placed the mountain over the people (Babylonian Talmud: Shabbath 77a; compare Avoda Zarah, 2a).

Ali translates Jesus’s speech in Q3:49 as “I will fashion the state of destiny out of mire for you, and breathe (a new spirit) into it, and (you) will rise by the will of God” (p. 56). The literal translation is “I will fashion from you, from clay, the likeness of a bird, and will breathe unto it; and by God’s will it will fly.” The footnote that Ali provides to explain his version does not seem to take into account that the Qur’anic view parallels that of the Gospel of Thomas, nor that the rule in Arabic language is that “speech is taken in its literal meaning, unless there is a qualifier that evidences otherwise.” These departures from the literal portrayal of events from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament grab the attention because they seem to deny the Qur’anic imperative to seek the history of the prophets from the people of the earlier scriptures (Q10:94, Q16:43, Q21:7).

A most serious mistranslation is that of awliya’ as “friends” (pp. 91, 92, 105, 479), when the term means “those in charge” or “overlords.” Taken out of context, these renditions serve against the very purpose Ali so faithfully tries to achieve: to show the Qur’an as a document fostering the best of human interaction. Despite several mistranslations, the excellent qualities of this interpretive translation far exceed the drawbacks, however, and it is an invaluable contribution to the field of Qur’anic studies.

Khaleel Mohammed
Brandeis University

Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, by Michael Cook. 702 pages, bibliography, index. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000. $85.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-521-66174-9

Al-amr bi’l-ma`ruf wa’l-nahy `an al-munkar is a religious duty of principal importance. Mentioned in the Koran in several instances, the terminology of this principle of commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong indicates that it relates to standards of social behavior already established at the time when the Koran came into being. It calls upon the Muslims to live and act in accordance with what is ma`ruf, or known and familiar and therefore approved, and not to do so according to what is munkar, or unknown and unfamiliar and hence not approved. In the course of history, the standards related to this code may have undergone change and specification. In recent years, the principle of commanding right and forbidding wrong attracted wider public attention after it was relied upon in several court cases in Egypt in which people were accused of conduct not in line with public morals. A term derived from the realm of market inspection, these cases came to be known as so-called hisba cases. Today, hisba and al-amr bi’l-ma`ruf wa’l-nahy `an al-munkar appear to be used to express one and the same thing. What the hisba cases illustrated and what has been the problem with al-amr bi’l-ma`ruf wa’l-nahy `an al-munkar from the start is that assessing what is known seems to be an easier task than determinating what is not. As a result, Muslim scholars have never run out of material about which to reason, to agree and disagree.

In fact, until the present day they seem not to have found the one answer to what is to be commanded and what is to be forbidden. It is therefore no wonder that the present book is as large as it is. With Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, Cook has written the book on the topic. He presents a genealogy of a thought so central that no assessment of Islam is possible without reference to it. In accordance with the historical chronology of schools and sects within Islam and the writing, publication, and perception of their works, Cook has provided a history of ideas based on the study of an incredibly large number of primary sources in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

The book is composed of twenty chapters divided into five parts. After a general introductory discussion in part one of the early sources of Islam, the Koran, the prophetic and other traditions as well as the biographical literature, Cook dedicates the whole of part two to the Hanbalites. In part three, he treats the Mu`tazilites and Shi`ites, before dealing with the different Sunni schools in part four. Part five, finally, covers developments in modern times. Though researched over almost two decades, the book is beautifully written and reads as if done in one go. It can only be hoped that a paperback edition is due to come out soon to make this masterpiece of intellectual history accessible to as many people as possible in and outside the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.

Jan Goldberg
St. Antony’s College, Oxford

Muhammad and the Rise of Islam: The Creation of Group Identity, by Subhash C. Inamdar, M.D., 240 pages, footnotes, bibliography, indices. Madison CT: International Universities Press, 2001. $40.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-887841-28-8

Muhammad and the Rise of Islam aspires to explain the rise of Islam by applying psychoanalytic and sociologic theories. After a first chapter on child development, Inamdar (in part II) criticizes certain psychoanalytic and sociological studies of the link between the individual and society, and accepts some theories of group formation. The conclusion (pp. 68-9) defines groups in terms of basic needs and fulfillment. The author, however, speaks interchangeably about the needs of an individual and those of a group. Also, it is not clear whether the ‘individual’ discussed is the founder of the group, or any one of it.

Part III begins with a survey of pre-Islamic Arabia, the Fertile Crescent, and the development of the universal religions. It is argued that the deterioration of tribal structure in the cities gave rise to these religions. This thesis reads like a description of urbanization in modern times rather than an account of the ancient Near East. Moreover, the thesis is belied by the discussion of Mecca and its tribal system. Generalizations are sometimes wrong, at other times tautological (for example, p. 85). The author continues to tell the story of Abraham, pre-Islamic Mecca, and the early years of Muhammad in traditional (Muslim) terms. Recent debates and research on these subjects are ignored.

Part IV begins by treating the Emigration, the Constitution of Medina, and the Prophet’s relationship with the Jews. Next, a survey of the main military events of the Medinan period is given, followed by an attempt to explain Muhammad’s career in psychological terms. Finally, a traditional account of the Ridda and the conquests is delivered. Historical narrative is intertwined with applications of group theories. This approach sometimes amounts to a rephrasing of common knowledge in sociological jargon (for example, pp. 140-42). The sociological argument (pp. 147, 153) that the leader (Muhammad) met the group’s need for justice by his equitable distribution of booty is not valid, because the sources report that loyal Muslims complained about the Prophet’s decisions concerning booty. The psychological analysis is applied to disparate matters. Some of the (unproved) assumptions sound true, such as the connection between Muhammad’s childhood experience and his sensitivity to social justice. However, social justice is an ancient monotheistic theme. The linkage between the Religion of Abraham and Muhammad’s ‘adulthood crisis’ is unconvincing too. The author seems to be applying theories regardless of facts. Muhammad was brought up by his grandfather and uncle, yet the author argues (pp. 198-99) that “the ideals of group support that Muhammad never had in his clan and tribe were to be replaced by a new religious tribe that would support everyone.” The sound idea, that “religion replaced blood as the defining social bond” (p. 226), is a commonplace among Islamicists.

Muhammad and the Rise of Islam is written partly in psychoanalytic and sociologic jargon, and partly in a traditional historic style. Large parts of it are quotations from a limited range of translated Islamic sources, and from studies. Of the 142 items recorded in the bibliography, only 20 are related to the study of Islam. Inamdar views Islam as a monolithic, unchanging entity (for example, pp. 228-29), ignoring the constant dialectics between groups within Islam on the one hand, and between reality and religious ideals on the other. He takes seriously the outdated observation that “Islam was born in the full light of history” (p. 101), disregarding the forces that shaped Islamic historiography, and the fact that many of the reports about Muhammad are useless for psychoanalysis, having been fabricated to convey certain messages. Another methodological mistake is the use of the Quran as a historical source. The Quran, as a rule, is not explicit about historic details. It is only the problematic historical tradition that interprets certain verses as accounts of the Prophet’s life.

Finally, the study is not devoid of material that is irrelevant to the subject (for example, pp. 55-53, 181, 239-40), and of contradictions. While stating that there are “no universal inductive lessons from history” (p. 239), the author offers his own study as a contribution to the understanding of all group phenomena (p. xvii, see also p. 117 vs. p. 120 about the opposition; p. 234 vs. p. 235 about the spread of Islam). The basic idea of the book, namely, to study a group in conjunction with the individual who initiated it, may be sound, but the present attempt is unconvincing.

Ella Landau-Tasseron
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam, by Kathryn Kueny. 179 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. $18.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7914-5054-6

Kueny takes a non-traditional and original approach to examining wine in early Islam. She argues that by observing how different rhetorical styles are employed to identify, label, and classify wine as a prohibited substance, that insight can be gained into how early Muslim believers resolved issues of conflict and defined proper human action and their understanding of their relationship to God. Her main premise is that because wine was an ambiguous anomaly that the examination of the various types of language (genres) employed to address this issue sheds light on how early tradition defined itself and established interpretive boundaries that led to a distinctive Islamic tradition. Five separate chapters examine and describe prophetic, analytic, narrative, poetic, and mystical discourse as different complementary linguistic strategies of interpretation, which address and resolve the ambiguity of wine within the context of early Islam.

These five genres are represented by the Qur’an, canonical collections of Hadith, information taken from several noncanonical collections of Sunni Hadith, the Biography (Sira) of the Prophet, the Tarikh of al-Tabari, a number of Tafsir, three collections of Shi’ite Hadith, selections from two Jahiliyan poets, and selections from two Sufi mystics. The author asserts that narrative discourse differs greatly from the prophetic and analytical genres, which establish divine law. She demonstrates the linkages between analytical and narrative discourse which forge the past and the history of the community within a human setting, thus bridging a gap and merging articulated law with communal human practice. This link is illustrated within both Sunni and Shi’ite traditions.

The Rhetoric of Sobriety’s examination of the integration of rhetorical genres as a stratagem to identify wine and to adapt to and understand its prohibition within an evolving religious tradition is novel. Kueny is careful to point out that this study in meant to complement more traditional approaches, which deal with social, historical, political, and theological concerns. She suggests how a similar methodological focus on genre and interpretation could be taken to examine additional ambiguous issues and advocates that this approach could be used to advance studies in comparative religion. The author acknowledges her debt to the works of Goldziher and Wensick, relating to the treatment of wine in the Qur’an and Hadith, which highlight the inconsistencies between law and practice. Her five genres closely correspond to Wansbrough’s five exegetical genres. The study is well researched and documented and draws on additional materials taken from the Judaic and Christian traditions. Serious readers will find the book thought-provoking. It is hoped that other scholars will undertake similar studies. An investigation of the utilization of different genres as an approach to understanding how new beliefs and practices came to be accepted and evolved will prove to be a useful ancillary for illuminating interpretive religious stratagems.

Mark David Luce
University of Chicago

The Qur'an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam's Scripture, by Daniel A. Madigan. xv, 236 pages, bibliography, index. Princeton: University Press, 2001. $45 (Cloth) ISBN 0-691-05950-0.

The Qur’an continually refers to qur’an and kitab, giving it the appearance of a highly self-conscious book by comparison with the Bible. Nevertheless, it often seems that the reference of these words is not to the book that we have. Despite later usage, where for example al-kitab and al-sunna are the bases of the law, the Qur’an itself names qur’an and kitab successively, as though they were distinct from each other. As for qur’an, William A. Graham, Kristina Nelson, and Frederick M. Denny have reminded us in the past twenty years that it means ‘recitation’ and that Muslims normally enjoy the Qur’an as it is recited, not by discursive reading. Indeed, Muslims developed a separate word, mushaf, for the written text between two covers, and continued to use qur’an to indicate not only the whole corpus but as little as one verse—“Give me a qur’an or hadith report,” one might say, to justify a particular theological or juridical position.

Kitab as ‘book’ also runs into difficulties. In the Qur’an itself, it applies equally to, among other things, divine foreordination, a complete record of sinners’ deeds, something contained in suhuf (scrolls), and previous revelations to non-Arab peoples. The Qur’an’s repeated command, udhkur fi 'l-kitab, has suggested to some modern scholars that the Prophet was deliberately compiling a book comprising only some passages of what now makes up the Qur’an. Altogether, kitab must mean something other than the book in our hands. Madigan proposes that kitab means primarily (perhaps as a symbol or metaphor) God’s knowledge or authority. It is the Prophet’s opponents, apparently, who demand that it come down all at once and be done (Q. 17.93). But God’s authority cannot be sent down all at once inasmuch as it normally manifests itself in relation to some specific situation. “Taken all together,” says Madigan, “what the Qur’an says of the kitab points not to a circumscribed corpus of liturgy, dogma, and law that can be duplicated and parceled out for each group, but to an open-ended process of divine engagement with humanity in its concrete history” (p. 178). What the earliest Muslims prized was of course not its circumscription but its immediate availability—no wonder they took their time collecting it between two covers.

If we abandon the equation of kitab with ‘book,’ the Qur’an in particular, not only obviously troublesome passages become clear. Consider, for example, dhalika 'l-kitabu la rayba fih (Q. 2.2). The demonstrative pronoun, dhalika, has a distancing effect inappropriate to a self-description of the Qur’an but perfectly appropriate as something to which the Qur’an testifies, of which the Qur’an itself is a fine example. Once revelation had ceased and the Qur’an had been collected between two covers, it was natural for the Muslims to stress the equation of kitab with this Qur’an. Yet Madigan’s interpretation is consistent with remarkably much of the exegetical tradition, as in its insistence on revelation in very small units, sometimes shorter than a verse, and in its continually assigning revelations to particular situations. Altogether, The Qur’an’s Self-Image is a splendid contribution to qur’anic scholarship.

Christopher Melchert
Oriental Institute, University of Oxford

Islamic Interpretations of Christianity, edited by Lloyd Ridgeon. 255 pages, index. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ISBN 0-312-23854-1

For various reasons, Islamic Interpretations of Christianity will attract much attention today. The contributors examine different genres of Islamic literature (exegesis, hadith, polemic, and so forth) analyzing references to Christianity and Christians. All are motivated by the ‘alarming’ state of Muslim-Christian relations today. Given the exclusive focus on Muslims (the cover announces that unlike others, this collection is not comparative), the ‘problem’ is located within the Islamic ‘tradition.’ This ‘heritage’ often produces artificial specificities, for example, when Ridgeon and Philip Lewis are disappointed that Muslims consider Islam superior to other religions, even though such conviction is equally common among religious Christians and Jews.

Cautioning against a fad of “sociological reductionism,” Malise Ruthven argues that “much of what was [sic] happening in Muslim communities today could only be understood in terms of the unfolding and implementing of theology” (p. xii). Indeed, the contributors take theology as the more ‘authentic’ expression and determinant of Muslims’ identity and experience—and this presupposition often doubles as the essays’ conclusion. Silent remain millions of Muslims whose relations with Christians are produced by local social contexts.

In one of the collection’s stronger essays, David Thomas surveys medieval polemics on the doctrine of the Trinity, presenting evidence for a shared religious discourse: Christian and Muslim theological arguments were dialogic, partaking of the same intellectual trends and developing symbiotically as a result of contact. It is especially refreshing that Thomas takes into account those Christians ‘represented’ (rather than presenting a one-sided account of Muslim ‘interpretations’), according them agency and responsibility in inter-faith relations. Lewis Lewisohn traces “esoteric Christianity” in Persian Sufi poetry, arguing that under the early non-Muslim Mongols, Sufism became popular and “more inclusivistic” [sic] (pp. 130-31). Now there is no argument supporting this link; indeed, all the ‘evidence’ dates from periods after the Mongols’ conversion to Islam.

Neal Robinson discusses Sayyid Qutb’s exegesis of verses that refer to Christians (but never mentions Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam, which begins by comparing Islam and Christianity). In criticising Qutb for his departure from Qur’anic language, and the Muslim Brotherhood for their difference from the early Muslim community, Robinson reveals that he considers Qutb a medieval, not a modern thinker. One need not admire Qutb to realize that he was a modern thinker; that every ‘traditionalizing’ movement is one of retraditionalizing, for it occurs in a new context and, therefore, has distinctly novel significance.

Kate Zebiri copiously quotes inflammatory rhetoric by modern Muslim polemicists. The selection is astoundingly indiscriminate; the cacophony apparently a “universal and pervasive Muslim discourse” she calls “Occidentalism,” arguing that it resembles Orientalism—minus the political domination. (The reader is left wondering what Orientalism was, if not a knowledge produced by a certain relationship of power?) Zebiri wants to have her cake and eat it too when she adds, “th[is] discourse is neither homogeneous nor necessarily self-consistent” (pp. 198-99). Perhaps this owes to her arbitrary selection and simplistic analysis.

While noting that Muslim-Christian relations are informed by several historical events, the contributors do not treat the Crusades, medieval Iberia, or modern nationalism. Most essays suffer from the limited sources consulted: ibn Taymiyya looms as a spectre of intolerance, but only in introductory remarks; ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (the first to devote a treatise to non-Muslims) is conspicuously absent. Typographical, chronological, and transliteration errors abound.

If this collection is an academic work, then the lacunae and methodological shortcomings (and often, thin research and awkward expression) stand as sufficient warning. Unfortunately, the sweeping statements and the cursory sketches of a few ideas are precisely why this work may be seductive for non-specialists: the clichés are neatly uncomplicated, the generalizations elude verification.

Tamer El-Leithy
Princeton University