Yossef Rapoport

Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Law: Debating Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya

Wise words. Taken as a whole, this is a truly excellent book. Marzouki and Roy have taken a team of scholars to gaze steadily and persistently into the heart of a delicate (and for some, provocative) issue and emerged with excellent insights into transnationalism and territorialization. The place and role of converts to and from Judaism, Christianity and Islam within the Mediterranean has been hotly debated and remains contested in many respects. Conversion is both an immediate living reality and a palpable signal to future possibilities, as much as a spiritual quest for the transcendent. This deeply textured and philosophical analysis is a must for readers of both modern Western society and the Middle East alike.

The formation of Islamic hermeneutics: how Sunni legal theorists imagined revealed law

Islamic institutions and societies in the conquered territories) and Arabization (the oral and written diffusion of Arabic) – two phenomena that often took place side-by-side, but not necessarily according to fixed patterns. There were other measures of Islamicization besides the diffusion of Arabic, as the survival of the Berber culture proves. Christopher Picard examines the historiographical sources available for the study of the period under consideration, all of which reflect the efforts of competing powers (Fatimid, Umayyad and Abbasid) to build their own memory of the facts. Finally, Sophie Gilotte and Anneliese Nef introduce the contribution of archaeology, numismatics and sigillography. Even if these sources present their own problems of interpretation, they provide an essential complement – and at times a corrective – to written sources. The remaining parts deal with religious Islamicization, related social transformations (funerary customs, toponymy, genealogies and fiscal policies) and specific issues in the Islamicization of the Maghreb. Readers particularly interested in the history of Muslim–Christian relations will find the three essays that make up part two most interesting. The focus is on the social and collective factors in the process of Islamicization, rather than on individual cases of conversion. Allaoua Amara seeks to reconstruct the different phases in the Islamicization of Central Maghreb and Dominique Valérian explores the scarce information that can be gleaned from Latin sources concerning the persistence of Christianity in North Africa, its organization and its links with Roman Christianity. This provides a necessary corrective to past scholarship on the subject, which was, perhaps, too intimately connected with colonial and ecclesiastical projects. Lastly, in his second contribution to the volume, Aillet re-examines the debate concerning the evolution of Christianity in al-Andalus between the eighth and twelfth centuries. In his view, Míkel de Epalza’s hypothesis of a rapid extinction of the Christian community, which would already have been reduced to a marginal minority by the ninth century, may be an overreaction to the ‘continuist’ school of interpretation in Spanish history associated with Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and Francisco J. Simonet. This school sought to emphasize not only the continuity of the homo hispanicus through the Islamic period, but also, and more fundamentally, his contribution to the specific ‘enlightened’ character of Andalusian Islam. The essays in this volume are for a specialized readership. The volume includes a trilingual (French, English and Spanish) summary of each contribution and brief biographies (in French) of the authors. Full references are given in the footnotes, and thus there is no general bibliography. We look forward to the promised publication of a second volume of contributions from the same seminar.