This new manual is, after the Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (2008), the second attempt at providing a survey of what has been achieved in the field of Islamic theology during recent years. The book is useful and has its merits, but structurally it is just an everyday collective volume. Forty-one contributors (“experts”) offer their guidance to the reader, and the editor does her best to keep them in line. Some chapters are good, even excellent; others do not go beyond what has been said some time ago (compare pp. 162 f. and 367–9 with EI 2 XII, 343–8 s. v. Ḥāl); and a few demonstrate a certain lack of experience. “Theology” is understood in a rather narrow sense: no Quranic exegesis (tafsīr), no prophetic tradition (ḥadīth), no sacred law (in spite of uṣūl al-fiqh), merely ʿilm al-kalām. Thus it is at least at the beginning – later on the horizon opens up, and we get chapters on mysticism or philosophy, referring to an age where the argumentational schemes typical of kalām had disappeared and a kind of “scholasticism” entered the scene. At the end, with modern revivalism, we are confronted with a New Kalām based on the Quran or modern philosophy (chapter 40), or even a New Tafsīr (no. 41), although earlier examples of theological tafsīr (for instance Fakhr al-dīn al-Rāzī's Mafātīḥ al-ghayb) were passed over in silence.
In general, the contributors write about what they have always written about, though this time with reduced documentation, the only charity offered being a bibliography. The presentation is somewhat pontifical, parsimonious with immediate evidence. Some articles are summaries of PhD theses or research projects, or information available in the internet; the reader would then sometimes prefer to consult the original. The overall display is not chronological; the long march through the centuries is interrupted by three “Excursuses” (two of them on Christian theology written in Arabic and one on “Ungodly cosmologies”, i.e. pre-Islamic Iranian systems vaguely connected with what was labelled al-Dahriyya by the Muslims) and eight topical chapters called “case-studies”. What is missing is a perceptive “Epochenbewußtsein”; even the “Avicennian turn”, which has become part of contemporary jargon, appears only once (p. 587). On the systematic level the evolution is conceived more or less as a single-track business; there is not much sensitivity for turning points or deadlocks. The failure of the Muʿtazilites to solve the problem of theodicy does not find any attention, and early attempts at circumventing predestination by denying God's foreknowledge remain unnoticed; figures like Ibn al-Rāwandī are marginalized. With a few exceptions (chapter 39 for instance), theological achievements are not put into their historico-political or social and educational context. There is, of course, something about the miḥna (chapter 36), but it sounds somehow like Patton (1897) redivivus.
The presentation is at its best with regard to specific geographical areas: Spain (chapters 29 and 38); or India (chapter 34); even Yemen, in spite of the provisional character of the results (chapter 27). But the overall approach remains antiquarian rather than analytical. The handling of the primary phase in particular leaves much to be desired; the gamut of options available to early Islam does not come into focus. We are left alone with the Qadariyya and their presumptive offspring, the Muʿtazila (chapters 1–3 and 7–8). The Jahmiyya is put into the wrong place (as part of chapter 3, which is otherwise quite original). The Murjiʾa has its first acte de présence only in the chapter on Māturīdism (no. 17). Its earliest text, the K. al-Irjāʾ, does not find accommodation at all, possibly because it was not written in kalām style. The discussions about the nature of belief (īmān) fall on deaf ears because they only emerged in ḥadīth and early akhbār.
As is to be expected, the book is not without inconsistencies. Ibn Ḥanbal's Radd ʿalā l-Jahmiyya, which is regarded as authentic on p. 652, is shifted into the fifth century on p. 627, at least with its “final edition”. Samarqandī's death is fixed to the year 702/1303 on pp. 414 and 495 but remains vague (“ca. 690/1291”) on pp. 537 and 613. Dating the “beginnings” is still a matter of taste (compare chapter 1, pp. 38 f., with chapters 14 and 17), and when early texts are stuffed with quotations from the Quran their discussion has not yet got entirely rid of the Hagarism syndrome. Light at the end of the tunnel might come from models such as the “long” Late Antiquity proposed by British ancient historians (P. Brown, A. Cameron and others).
Technicalities are not the problem; OUP is still a good imprint. But almost all bibliographies lack chronological depth, and there is a certain loss of internationality (the great exception being chapter 40). French authors suffer most, in spite of the fact that it all started with Gardet-Anawati's Introduction à la théologie musulmane (1948). The chapter on mysticism (20) neglects all contributions by R. Gramlich and, what is worse, an important collection of early texts on maḥabba (Radtke, Materialien, 2009). Printing mistakes are rare, but they are striking: al-Muṣāraʿat al-falāsifa (p. 309), al-ʿulūm al-awāʾil (p. 656), Jahamiyya (p. 652), ikhāfat al-mutakallimūn (p. 655), Ibn al-ʿĀrif instead of Ibn al-ʿArīf (p. 330; cf. EI 2 III 713), Ḥāshiyya/Ḥāshīya instead of Ḥāshiya (pp. 539 and constantly 544 f.), mufājiʾa instead of mufājaʾa (p. 155), nāẓirihī instead of naẓīrihī (p. 109, n. 10), Zakarīyāʾ al-Rāzī instead of Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ (p. 500).
What we get for the relatively moderate price are therefore only bricks for a tower of Babel. In itself this is not a bad result; a synthesis would not have been possible anyway. Moreover, specialists tend to fabricate themselves a synthesis of their own by way of the internet. Compared to Wikipedia all those “companions” and “handbooks” look like dinosaurs. So, why feed them any longer? Google will, as we are promised, patiently preserve what the present generation (as far as they read and write English) thought they knew.
