The last two decades have witnessed a flood of books on contemporary Islamic political thought (i.e. on a complex and contentious political discourse which claims to be grounded in specifically Islamic values and principles), to the point that no one can hope to have read everything, or even every work of real substance. In that context, the work offered to us here by Professor Böwering and his distinguished associate editors (Patricia Crone, Wadad Kadi, Devin J. Stewart and Muhammad Qasim Zaman) is very welcome indeed. Its goal is indubitably ambitious – viz., to survey the major thinkers, writings, concepts, institutions, regimes, movements and sects through which Islamic political discourse has been articulated and embodied from Muhammad and the Quran down to the present. Apart from discrete entries under these categories, the editors have included a series of longer thematic essays (on, e.g., “authority”, “modernity”, “shari'a”) which attempt to integrate this disparate material within broad historical and interpretative frameworks. To this end, Böwering and his colleagues have marshalled a very wide array of contributors. These are by no means always the usual suspects for a work in this field, and only a few have been asked to write more than two entries. Readers can thus be assured of encountering diverse and often fresh perspectives.
This work is aimed first of all at an audience of interested non-specialists, a term which might include everyone from university undergraduates to policymakers to scholars working on problems which lead them outside their zone of expertise. Articles thus use Arabic terms sparingly, and general entries have English headings (e.g. “caliphate” rather than “khilafa”, “community” rather than “umma”), except where a word has become part of general usage (e.g. “jihad”, “shari'a”, “sunna”). For most readers, this practice is obviously an advantage, though specialists immersed in the Perso-Arabic vocabulary of the field might occasionally miss the (often illusory) precision of these terms. The level of factual accuracy seems generally high throughout, and controversial issues are almost always presented in a balanced manner. The main issues raised by this work thus lie on the level of approach and interpretation. To this reviewer nothing seems seriously wrongheaded, but there are distinct differences in sophistication, nuance and originality even between articles in the same general category (biographical, thematic, sects and movements, etc.).
As one might expect in regard to an intellectual tradition reaching back fourteen centuries, entries focusing on early Islamic and medieval topics predominate. The twentieth century also receives quite ample coverage, in spite of a few odd gaps. For example, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Atatürk, and Zia-ul-Haq all receive separate entries, but there are none for Reza Shah or his son, whose policies are essential to understanding the enormous impact of Shari'ati, Jalal Al-i Ahmad and Khomeini during the 1970s. One also looks in vain for Taha Husayn or Muhammad Husayn Haykal, though their writings – both secularist and islamiyyat – were a crucial element of Egypt's cultural politics during the interwar and early post-war eras. However, in this reviewer's opinion, the three centuries from 1600 to 1914 are the period most seriously short-changed. We have Muhammad ‘Ali, but neither al-Jabarti, the brilliant chronicler and bitter antagonist of his “reforms”, nor Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, the advocate for the new order of things. The Tanzimat and Young Ottoman reformers receive very terse coverage. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876, a genuinely foundational document, surely deserves an entry of its own. Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), an event of mythic stature in modern Iran, is mentioned only at scattered moments, under the entries “ayatollah”, “liberalism”, and “Qajars”. Obviously editors must make hard choices, and not everyone or everything of importance can be included in a work of this size. Still, these omissions seem particularly painful.
In addition, the biographical entries in particular are of very unequal length and depth, so that thinkers or political actors of similar stature and influence receive markedly disparate treatment. For example, Ibn Taymiyya is treated at some length and with considerable nuance, as he certainly deserves, but the entry on Ibn Khaldun is very concise and mostly biographical. To what degree these disparities reflect the guidelines laid down by the editors or the choices of the authors, I cannot say.
Overall, the longer thematic articles, some written by the editors and some by outside contributors, seem far more consistent and often offer analyses and interpretations that repay close reading. Indeed, some of the issues discussed above are mitigated, if not entirely resolved, in these essays. In fact, the most effective and satisfying way to use this encyclopaedia may be to browse through it as if it were a synthetic rather than a reference work, focusing first on the thematic articles and then following up as needed with entries on specific persons, events, terms, etc. In any case, and despite the problems presented above, this is certainly a very useful contribution to the field – a convenient and reliable first reference, and through its longer articles a good means of finding one's way through the complexities of Islamic political discourse over the last fourteen centuries.
