Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

The widespread conceptual framework for understanding relations between "Western civilization" and "Islamic civilization" is based on the assumption that Western inventions challenged Muslim societies as they did societies wherever Western commerce influenced local markets. According to that paradigm, modernity was an incursion that evoked both rejection and consumption among the societies radically altered by inventions and commodities produced in Europe and America. Muslim scholars in particular are often thought to have been so committed to their tradition that they reacted against Western incursions into Muslim societies. Halevi (history and law, Vanderbilt Univ.) argues that material products and goods move across cultures and are not always invested with cultural values; when they are, the cultures are best described as entanglements. Rashid Rida (1865-1935) drew on Islamic Shari'a to show that Muslim societies could reform themselves and thus participate in modernity. Through his journal, al-Manar, Rida issued fatwas based on the Koran and the Salaf, scripture and early tradition, to answer questions about Euro-American goods--toilet paper, paper money, the gramophone, the telegraph, photographs, railways, law codes, lottery tickets, and luxury hotels--all in the service of reforming Islam. This excellent book is paradigm shifting.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.