Volume 26, Number 2 · February 22, 1979
Understanding Islam
By Peter Brown
The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet: Mirâj Nâmeh
introduction and commentaries by Marie-Rose Séguy
Braziller, 158, 58 plates pp., $40.00
La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu'au milieu du 11e siècle
by André Miquel
Mouton (Paris), 705 pp., $72.00
Islam and the Arab World
edited by Bernard Lewis
Knopf, 360 pp., $35.00
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople Vol. I: Politics and War
edited and translated by Bernard Lewis
Harper & Row, 266 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople Vol. II: Religion and Society
edited and translated by Bernard Lewis
Harper & Row, 310 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banû Sâsân in Arabic Society and Literature
by C.E. Bosworth
Brill (Leiden), Vol. II, 360 plus Arabic text pp., £ 25.92
The Classical Heritage in Islam
by Franz Rosenthal, translated by Emile Marmorstein, by Jenny Marmorstein
University of California Press, 320 pp., $18.50
The Camel and the Wheel
by Richard W. Bulliet
Harvard University Press, 352 pp., $16.00
The Matter of Araby in Medieval England
by Dorothee Metlitzki
Yale University Press, 320 pp., $15.00
History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented
by Bernard Lewis
Princeton University Press, 111 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
by Patricia Crone, by Michael Cook
Cambridge University Press, 268 pp., $21.50
At the time when Columbus sailed to the New World, Islam was the largest world religion, and the only world religion that showed itself capable of expanding rapidly in areas as far apart and as different from each other as Senegal, Bosnia, Java, and the Philippines. To take one small example: in the early fifteenth century, at the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, when Western culture was still compressed between the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and an unknown Atlantic, a man of learning and a manuscript illuminator in Herat, in western Afghanistan, together could take a legend of the Prophet Muhammad from the original Arabic and translate it into Uighur, a Turkish language of eastern Central Asia. This magnificent book in which the two scripts—Arabic and Uighur—march together across every page, and where the motifs and the styles of painting of Iran and China mingle, is now edited and introduced by Marie-Rose Séguy. It takes us in one sweep across one of the axes of the Islamic world, from the Hijaz, in western Saudi Arabia, to the westward provinces of China.
Review, 5595 words
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