Encounters With Islam - Studies in the Anthropology of Muslim Cultures

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).

Product details

• Authors: Lawrence Rosen, Lawrence (Princeton University Rosen
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.09.2023
• EAN: 9781009389037
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0938903-7
• No. of pages: 256
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology > Other religions; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; HISTORY / Middle East / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion, RELIGION / Islam / Rituals & Practice, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Islamic Studies, c 1500 onwards to present day, Islamic Law, Social and cultural anthropology, Middle Eastern history, Islamic Life & Practice, Modern Period, C 1500 Onwards, Relating to Islamic / Muslim people and groups, Systems of law: Islamic law, LAW / Islamic, Islamic life and practice, HISTORY / Islamic