Jan 12, 2008

Medieval Judaism, Christianity and Islam

by Cliopatria

James Reston, Jr.,"What Islam Wrought," Washington Post, 6 January, and Eric Ormsby,"The Lost Garden," NYT, 6 January, review David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. The topic seems unusual for the noted biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. An important contribution to scholarship, the reviewers suggest, the book has the imprint of Lewis's"stilted academic prose."

William Dalrymple,"Eat Your Heart Out, Homer," NYT, 6 January, reviews Ghalib Lakhnavi's and Abdullah Bilgrami's The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, trans. by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. This is the first new translation in 300 years of a massive compilation of medieval Persian oral tradition that is now widely dispersed. In 2002, Washington, DC's the Sackler Gallery featured a major exhibit of the original manuscript of"The Adventures of Hamza" (scroll down to 26 June-29 September 2002). Hat tip.

Geraldine Brooks's The People of the Book: A Novel, a fictionalized history of the authentic 600 year old Sarajevo Haggadah, is reviewed by Yvonne Zipp for the Christian Science Monitor, 2 January; Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, 6 January; Emily Barton for the LA Times, nd; and Janet Maslin for the NY Times, 7 January.

More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 1/12/2008

Dear Professor Lelouche, My check of the internet suggests that Said was fluent from childhood in Arabic. As a child of Lebanese/Palestinian parents and raised in Egypt, that makes sense to me. How about citing evidence that he was not?

Serge Lelouche - 1/12/2008

No, he didn't write any history, he just attacked those who did.

Manan Ahmed - 1/12/2008

Last time I checked, Said was not writing a history of medieval Islam.

Serge Lelouche - 1/12/2008

Speaking of orientalists, how good was Edward Said's Arabic?

Ralph E. Luker - 1/12/2008

Since Lewis's prior publications are in late 19th and 20th century American subjects, you'd even have to wonder about his preparation to read the medieval European sources. Hubris, I think, is the word.

Manan Ahmed - 1/12/2008

"Lewis is not a historian of Islam." And cannot access Arabic texts in their original. Yet, "His narrative is enriched by Arabic sources that are often ignored by European scholars. " Quoi??

No access to primary material on the civilizational story that one is writing, supposedly for an academic audience, published by Norton - a respected press of academic texts.

I can't even qualify this as neo-orientalism.