The book under review, based on the author's PhD thesis accepted by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Münster, Germany, is a study of the influential Muslim scholar Abū Thanāʾ al-Alūsī who lived in Baghdad during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is based on printed and unprinted Arabic sources and Ottoman archival material from the Başbakanlık Arşivi in Istanbul.

The book is divided into five parts: (A) the biography of the scholar; (B) a historical “contexualization” (a rather general and superficial sketch of the history of Iraq during the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century); (C) another, this time more specific, contextualization of the biography of Abū Thanā' with respect to his relations with the local Ottoman administration, and also containing his stance in the controversy over the Babis in Iraq; (D) a description of the learned milieu of Baghdad and Iraq in which he took part; and (E) an extensive literary and biographical interpretation of Abū Thanā' al-Ālūsī's book Ġarā'ib al-iġtirāb, one of three works in which the scholar described his voyage to Istanbul where he in vain tried to regain the administration of the Marǧān waqf that had been taken from his control. (I am not convinced by the author's argument that Abū Thanā' did not hope to recover the administration of the waqf for his family; cf. pp. 287 f.)

I have some gripes with two of the parts. Part B probably could have been omitted and part C, at certain points, suffers from both a lack of critical reading of the sources and a sometimes rather inconclusive interpretation (Cf. e.g. the claims made on governor Ali Paşa's personnel policy on pp. 168–76). In general, it is true that Ottoman Iraq is under-researched, but not to the degree Masarwa suggests. The author could have consulted Kerem Kayı, Bagdad 1831–1869 (Frankfurt: Lang, 2007) or Ebubekir Ceylan's book (The Ottoman Origins of Modern Iraq. Political Reform, Modernization and Development in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011) which, in its original version as a PhD dissertation, has been available online since 2007. Likewise her depiction of the events in Kerbela in 1843 would have benefited greatly from the study by Juan R.I. Cole and Moojan Momen, “Mafia, mob and Shiism in Iraq: the rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1842–1843” (Past & Present 112, 1986, pp. 112–43).

The strength of the study lies in its remaining parts, A, D and E, which form the core of the book and contain crucial information on Abū Thanāʾ al-Alūsī, his intellectual milieu (containing also valuable biographical information on some of his intellectual contemporaries) and his works, of which a complete commented list is given. Among his writings Masarwa also lists a hitherto unknown treatise on taṣawwuf. Outstanding in part E is the dense analysis of his travelogue Gharā'ib al-ightirāb as a complex literary work.

The study proves its point that the proto-Salafi interpretation of Abū Thanā' does him as little justice as do the restriction of his historical importance to his theological work or his depiction as a precursor of the nahḍa, but that in fact, he was one of the outstanding Arab-Ottoman intellectuals of his time and defies easy classification.