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Too often, Western encounters with the Islamic world commence with stereotypes and end with a renewed distance. Drawing from decades of experience studying the Muslim world, Lawrence Rosen challenges these narrow understandings. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Rosen shows the wide-ranging significance of Muslim art, culture, and law around the world. Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, he considers a wide range of contexts - from fifteenth-century mosaics in Central Asia that reveal a complex understanding of mathematics, to the political choices available to the youth of modern-day Morocco and Cairo. With in-depth analyses of art, law, and religion, and how they informed one another, Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world. Drawing linkages across time, regions, and cultures, this is a significant anthropological study of the Islamic world from a seasoned scholar.
List of contents
Introduction: theme and variation in the encounter of cultures; Part I. Expressive: 1. Choice and chaos: the social meaning of an Islamic art form; Part II. Legal: 2. Tribal law as Islamic law; 3. The meaning of the gift; 4. Islam and the rule of law; Part III. Political: 5. Anthropological assumptions and the Afghan war; 6. Aging out? Youth in the aftermath of the Arab spring; 7. Missionaries and Muslims: Moroccan engagement with the western other; Part IV. Critical: 8. Clifford Geertz, observing Islam; 9. Edward Said's unfinished critique: Orientalism revisited.
About the author
Lawrence Rosen is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. As both an anthropologist and a law scholar, he has worked for over forty years in the Arab world. Rosen was named to the first group of MacArthur Award Fellows and has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge. He has written prolifically, and his previous publications include Law as Culture (2008) and Islam and the Rule of Justice (2018).
Summary
Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, Lawrence Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world that challenges existing stereotypes. Using a diverse range of illustrative case studies, Rosen draws previously unseen linkages across time, regions, and cultures.
