Issue4 Article9

Book Review Sorting through Books on Islam after September 11, 2001 Snjezana Akpinar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam: Religion, History and Civilization (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 2002) Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü’s “Great Learning of the Pure and Real” and Liu Chih’s “Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs (New York: Vintage Books, 1999)

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he well-known Muslim scholar of Islamic Studies Seyyed Hossein Nasr introduces his latest book, Islam: Religion, History and Civilization, in the following manner: “Each period of the study of Islam in the West has produced its own literature, usually colored by the prejudices of the period.” To this broad statement (which could be applied to almost any field of study) Nasr adds a further definition of the issue: “There is in fact no religion in the world about which Western authors have written so much and in such a pejorative way as Islam.” This sentence pronounces a bitter judgment against Western intellectual pursuits. But, as Nasr proceeds to tell us: “Despite the persistence of this genre of writing and even its increase since the

tragedies of September 11, 2001, authentic works on Islam . . . are now readily available in the English language.”

In fairness to the scholars of Islam, Muslim and otherwise, one should stress along with Nasr that much solid scholarship was undertaken during the few decades that preceded September 11.

Some of the credit for this augmentation belongs to an ever-shifting worldview that gave an audience to such articulate voices as Edward Said, whose point of departure was postcolonialism, and Professor Nasr himself, whose point of departure is traditional Islam.

Both scholars focused on the dangerous effects of prejudice and secondhand information. This new discourse encouraged a succession of young Muslim issue 4, june 2004

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writers well steeped in the Western world to explain the faith and culture of their own world in a language easily understood by the West. Their efforts were in turn supported and supplemented by a new crop of Western “travelers to the East.” Of great importance in the work of these scholars is the translation of major Islamic texts. The publications of the Islamic Texts Society in the United Kingdom are specially noteworthy, above all the ongoing series of translations from the forty books of al-Ghazali’s Ihya ‘ulum al-din.1 Undoubtedly, much credit for all this activity goes to the paradigm shift of the 1960s and possibly to some of the globalization efforts of the 1990s.

The attacks of September 11 added an unpredicted element into the mix of publications on Islam, be they scholarly or otherwise. What was predictable was the immediate effect on scholarly publishing: many scholars in fields of studies even distantly related to Islam saw an opportunity to capture the limelight. Stores were flooded with books on Islam—the more famous springing to the front displays; journalists in their manner seized the moment with headlines; and so on down to the cab drivers who offered their opinions to unsuspecting clients. It remains to be seen whether this onslaught of books and opinions on Islam and the Middle East will result in an interest and dialogue that are sufficiently sustained for this horrible event to bear some beneficial outcome for the unhappy world of Islam.

The question that immediately arose from the ashes enveloping New York concerned authority and leader-

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ship: who is qualified to represent Islam, and who is qualified to be its Western interlocutor? What also came to the fore was a tremendous lack of knowledge— not merely prejudice, something to which we are all accustomed—but simple ignorance, which at this point is perhaps less painful since it cannot be categorized as intentional malice.

Among this flurry of books (which I confronted in the task of creating a reading list for an introductory course on Islam) Professor Nasr’s Islam: Religion, History and Civilization stands out in that it is written from a somewhat universalist perspective that conveys Islam’s respect for religion in general. The format is convenient and easy to read, as is Huston Smith’s Islam: A Concise Introduction (Harper SanFrancisco, 2001). Both espouse a humane perspective, the importance of which cannot be emphasized enough, given today’s highly politicized atmosphere and the global challenges to the field of religious studies.

The less authentic books on the shelves of our bookstores are easily discarded. Yet one can only shake one’s head at the never-ceasing wonder expressed by so many Western scholars at the “intransigence” and “unwillingness to dialogue” which these scholars attribute to Muslims. Most of these authors, intransigent themselves, seem not even mildly aware that what they are imposing and presupposing is the assumption that their own norms are the only unquestioned yardstick by which a religion, indeed a culture, can be measured. This timeworn ignorance and lack of curiousity are set against the per-

Book Review

sistence of serious inner problems facing the Muslim communities. One still encounters an insistence by Muslim scholars that they be admitted into the Westerners’ “club,” arguing that they too are Westerners, that their culture spurred the Renaissance, and that the West owes them a favor and an apology. Although all this is quite true—and most scholars in the field are still trying to get that specific message across in its various guises (the most beneficial among them being the translations of seminal works of the Muslim world)—this pleading seems to have outlived its usefulness.

It is therefore refreshing to see a book that turns in another direction, to the realm of the “Extreme Orient,” to use the term employed by Europeans of previous generations. Sachiko Murata’s Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light can be considered one of the “authentic” publications praised by Professor Nasr in his remarks quoted above. Murata’s book did not command the limelight, yet it is of a kind rarely sighted in the field: it is not an apology for Islam, and it stands on firm ground. It discusses how Muslim scholars in China went about the business of explaining their faith and culture to the Chinese Muslims, in Chinese rather than in Arabic or Persian.

Sachiko Murata is not new to her art. Her earlier publication The Tao of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) was a widely acclaimed scholarly work. In the introduction to Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, Murata tells us that in The Tao of Islam she tried to examine “Islamic thought with Far Eastern eyes,” since it became clear to

her that the manner in which Islamic intellectuality is portrayed by modern scholarship has at least as much to do with the preconceptions of Western scholars as with the actual texts.

She thus continues to challenge Western intellectuals not to think in terms of sharp dichotomies, and she adeptly uncouples the need to see everything through a Western lens from the broader need to examine historical events through a varied array of filters.

In her Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, Sachiko Murata presents two Islamic texts written in Chinese by two eighteenthcentury scholars: Wang Tai-yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s translation of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s famous work Lawaih (Gleams).

Brushing away all poetic metaphors, Liu Chih gave this work a title that means “Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm.” In Murata’s volume, on the pages opposite to her translation into English of Liu Chih’s Chinese rendering, is William Chittick’s new translation of the same work into English from the original Persian, thus making it possible for the reader to observe the rendering of a Persian text into Chinese. Needless to say, Persian as an Indo-European language is much easier to translate into English than is Chinese, and William Chittick’s translation maintains the original poetic flow of Jami’s Gleams.

Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light is a much-needed basic lesson in transcultural understanding. One cannot but wish, though, that Murata had supplied a somewhat more complex analysis of the historical perspective of Islam in issue 4, june 2004

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China, which arose from the minglings between the Arabs and the Central Asians, including the Turks and the Mongols who had earlier served as bridges between the various Easts and Wests. Without such an introduction, the book remains focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when European Christians began learning and writing about China, mostly with the intention of gaining converts. By contrast, the Muslim scholars Murata describes were educating their own, in order to allow for a more equitable discussion among cultures and religions of China— which in our present day one could define as the fine art of avoiding “ghettoization.”

At the other end of the spectrum stands Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs. It also appeared before September 11. We would be well served if politicians and experts would read this vibrant and deeply grounded portrayal of the contemporary Arab world. Professor Ajami’s book not only explains the past and present and gives us forebodings of the future, but does so in an entertaining, gracious manner that betrays a gentility specific to those who hail from ancient and developed cultures.

Taking us first into a Lebanon that once was his home (he is now on the faculty of the Advanced School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins), Ajami describes the political, social and literary scene and suggests the contours of his own biography. In our overly focused world it is refreshing to encounter a political analyst who allows himself a bit of imaginative roaming. The book opens slowly and somewhat dreamily,

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with poets and romantic political heroes, and then we are hurled into the thick of things as Ajami adds to the depth of focus of a man of letters the keen eye of a political analyst. In offering us a blend of the political, social and intellectual life of the Middle East, Fouad Ajami gives back to its inhabitants the dignity of a civilized land, something that most of the current political analysts prefer to ignore. Together with other Arab intellectuals of his generation he bemoans “the sterility of this new Arab time, its very ignorance of its sacred past . . . disfigured and turned into a weapon of combat.”2 ❧ Notes 1. Al-Ghazali, The Revival of Religious Sciences (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1989).

The Society’s publication of Abu Madyan, The Way of Abu Madyan, translated by Vincent Cornell (1996), is also a valuable contribution to Islamic scholarship. Across the Atlantic there is the joint Franco-American publication of Ibn ‘Arabi’s The Meccan Revelations, Selected Texts, eds. Michel Chodkiewicz, William Chittick, et al. (Paris: Sindbad; Houston: Rothko Chapel, 1988). There are the publications of the Ibn ‘Arabi Society, such as Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, A Commemorative Volume, eds. Stephen Hirtenstein and Michael Tiernan (Rockport: Element, 1993), and the editions of the State University of New York, among them William Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983). The superb works of the late Annemarie Schimmel must not be neglected, notably her And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneratioon of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (1985) and her Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1983), both brought out by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

2. Ajami, p. 165.