The Maghreb Review

242 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Lawrence Rosen, Varieties of Muslim Experience: Encounters with Arab Political and Cultural Life, Chicago University Press, 2008. The weight of contemporary events encourages historians and other professional academics to deviate from their routine fields of study and to write on current issues. 1 Lawrence Rosen, a well-known Princeton anthropologist and lawyer, has taken this road too. 2 In the book under review Rosen accumulated 12 chapters, arranged in three sections. Some of the chapters are read as an endeavour to decode various episodes viewed by television spectators. Others transmit Rosen’s impression of the encounter between the American way of life and Muslim citizens of the United States. In a paraphrase of Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? Rosen deconstructs Arab society, claiming that in the Arab world no autonomous self ever developed fully. Yet can we deduce from the stories grouped in this chapter a general theory on social relations amongst ‘the Arabs’? Chapter 3 asks the question: ‘Why do [young] Arab terrorists kill themselves?’. In posting this question Rosen is searching for a lucid interpretation of the news headlines. Yet does his reading of the martyr’s death as a ceremonial exchange ( in the style of Marcel Mauss) explain the atrocity? This seems to be a reductionist interpretation. The political and social realities and the Arabs’ conceptualization of personal identity prevent us from adopting or accepting Rosen’s exegesis. Moreover, suicide bombing is not a masculine domain and accounts of women self-bombings are not rare at all. Chapter 4 aims to illuminate the problematic of property in Moroccan culture. He claims that the standard Maliki theory holds that all the land belongs to the Merciful One (rahmaniya, although this concept of land tenure is not common in classical Islamic texts). To secure immobile property, Muslims in Morocco have elaborated various mechanisms, such as habus (waqf). This highlights the importance of social networks in protecting possessions. Adl is a key Islamic concept. It is associated with balance (mizan). Rosen scrutinizes a wide range of texts from the Qur’an to a modern-day Pakistani teacher in order to highlight his presumption that justice is a most essential virtues for Arabs. Ibn Khaldun has attracted much attention from modern historians, sociologists and political scientists. Rosen narrates the intellectual biography of this well-known Mamluk cadi and ambassador. He sees him as a Muslim and as an Arab thinker attached to Sufism. This is an extensive domain and the reader 1 Stephen R. Humphreys, Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age (University of California Press, 1999). 2 Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life (Chicago University Press, 2002). BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 243 of this short chapter does not have the sense that Rosen covers this wide topic adequately. The conspicuous presence of science students in Islamic radical movements has been noticed by observers, who asked how it happened that faculties of engineering, medicine and sciences were dominated by Islamists.3 In Chapter 10, ‘Muslim Scientists as Fundamentalists’, Rosen seeks an answer to this question in the history of Arab science. He elaborates on the importance of ilm in Islamic discourse and Arabs’ view of causality and worldly experience. They did not distinguish between ‘pure’ science and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Lawrence Rosen writes straightforwardly and empathetically on a world civilization that in the mass media is too often related to violence and brutality. Muslims who are troubled by the worldwide barrage of xenophobic rhetoric would find Rosen’s book a sympathetic account. YEHOSHUA FRENKEL Haifa University 3 Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, enlarged edition (Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 5. ...