Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
Mysteries of Islam
By Clifford Geertz
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam
by Marshall G.S. Hodgson
University of Chicago Press, 532 pp., $20.00
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods
by Marshall G.S. Hodgson
University of Chicago Press, 609 pp., $20.00
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 3: The Gunpowder Empire and Modern Times
by Marshall G.S. Hodgson
University of Chicago Press, 469 pp., $20.00
What is Islam? A religion? A civilization? A social order? A form of life? A strand of world history? A collection of spiritual attitudes connected only by a common reverence for Muhammad and the Quran? Any tradition which reaches from Senegal and Tanzania through Egypt and Turkey to Iran, India, and Indonesia, which extends from the seventh century to the twentieth, which has drawn on Judaism, Byzantine Christianity, Greek philosophy, Hinduism, Arabian paganism, Spanish intellectualism, and the mystery cults of ancient Persia, which has animated at least a half dozen empires from Abbasid to Ottoman, and which has been legalistic, mystical, rationalist, and hieratic by turns, is clearly not readily characterized, though it all too often has been.
Review, 4098 words
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