A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization - By Jonathan Kirsch PDF

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© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta BOOK REVIEWS EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University; Delaware, OH 43015. TELEPHONE: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643. E-MAIL ADDRESS: [email protected] WEB ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor EDITOR hisn_260 151..252 Richard Spall Ohio Wesleyan Univer...

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© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

BOOK REVIEWS EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University; Delaware, OH 43015. TELEPHONE: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643. E-MAIL ADDRESS: [email protected] WEB ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor EDITOR Richard Spall Ohio Wesleyan University hisn_260

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REGIONAL SUB-EDITORS Douglas R. Bisson (Early Modern Europe) Belmont University

Richard B. Allen (Africa, Middle East, and South Asia) Framingham State College

Helen S. Hundley (Russia and Eastern Europe) Wichita State University

Betty Dessants (United States Since 1865) Shippensburg University

Jose C. Moya (Latin America) University of California at Los Angeles

Paulette L. Pepin (Medieval Europe) University of New Haven

Susan Mitchell Sommers (Britain and the Empire) Saint Vincent College

Richard Spall (Historiography) Ohio Wesleyan University

Sally Hadden (United States) Florida State University

Peter Worthing (East Asia and the Pacific) Texas Christian University

STUDENT EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Kaleigh Felisberto Abraham Gustavson Neill McGrann Kristina Fitch Max Simon Lily Strumwasser

Kara Reiter Eric Francis Celia Baker Amadea Weber Greg Stull

WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE

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Drew Howard Jeffrey O’Bryon Chris Heckman

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AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. By Jamil M. Abun-Nasr. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 280. $27.50.)

Where and with whom religious “authority” resides within the Muslim community are questions that have especially absorbed scholars of Islam in recent years. Though this might seem like a presentist concern posed by the Islamist challenge, the roots of this thorny problem go back to the very origins of Islam. Disputes of various kinds—whether between Sunnis and Shìis or Salafiyya reformers and charismatic Sufi shaykhs—have at their heart the question of who are the “true” successors of the Prophet Muhammad. Jamil M. Abun-Nasr examines the claim of the awliyâ’ to spiritual leadership. The awliyâ’, most commonly translated as “saints” or “the friends of God,” are legendary mystics initially revered and later immortalized in hagiography. Successors of these early saints became the eponymous founders of Sufi tariqas or orders and the most populous “brotherhoods” that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Abun-Nasr himself defines awliyâ’ as “confederates of God” or “guardians” of the believers in an effort to underscore the social preeminence that these spiritually endowed shaykhs held for their followers (1). His central thesis is that Sufism took shape as a distinctive social movement due to the ability of the awliyâ’ to fill a spiritual void left first by the caliphs and later by the ‘ulama’. This idea is in itself not startlingly original, but it allows Abun-Nasr to create a coherent narrative that spans fourteen hundred years. Abun-Nasr describes this work as a “synthesis” and not a “Sufi work of reference” (4). Readers will nonetheless find it a useful Baedaker. Its early chapters contain lucid explanations of Sufi doctrine, especially as they relate to the concept of walâya or “guardianship.” Later chapters provide capsule histories of important Sufi figures and the major tariqas. Abun-Nasr is best at putting individual Sufis and Sufi movements in their immediate historical and social contexts. As the author of the pathbreaking 1965 study, The Tijaniyya, Abun-Nasr not surprisingly devotes much of his attention to developments in North and West Africa. In the final chapters, the author attempts to parse the ways different Sufi shaykhs responded to European colonial rule and its aftermath. Despite the book’s merits, in more than a few areas the author skates over an apparent difficulty or misses an opportunity to consider alternative explanations. For example, Abun-Nasr makes no mention of the “neo-Sufism” controversy that

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raged a decade ago, even though his discussion of how tariqas morphed into broad-based brotherhoods bears directly on the question. He makes only a perfunctory nod toward the later history of Sufi movements in Central and Southeast Asia. Shi’ism’s influence on Sufi doctrine is not mentioned at all, and the book ends wanly with a mere three pages devoted to the prospects of contemporary Sufism. Lastly, Abun-Nasr makes little use of the growing monograph literature of the past fifteen years that deals precisely with his concerns. These reservations aside, Muslim Communities of Grace remains an informative, accessible book, written with empathy and erudition. Students will find it beneficial but not entirely up-to-date. Oregon State University

Jonathan G. Katz

Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900. By Kristin Mann. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 473. $55.00.)

This study is an impressive addition to the several books on slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa previously written by scholars such as Robin Law, Paul Lovejoy, and Martin A. Klein. The primary focus is on the economic transition from slavery to palm oil production and the emergence of Lagos as a commercial city on the Nigerian coast. The arrival of the English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese for slaves changed the economic history of Lagos. As a result of the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, villages and cities in West Africa became victims of the European quest for slaves because of their strategic location along the coast. Aside from Lagos, the Portuguese and British built castles in Elmina and Cape Coast in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to pursue their economic interests. This book is significant for its contribution towards developing an enhanced understanding of the transatlantic economy as well as the centrality of Lagos in the economic history of Nigeria. Kristin Mann presents an excellent analysis explaining how the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the beginning of the new European imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century transformed Lagos into a nexus for legitimate European trade. As the author argues, palm oil production led to the increased use of slave labor, which explained why the rulers of Lagos were reluctant to end the slave trade. However, with the eventual abolition of the slave trade, Lagos developed rapidly not only as an economic, urban, and industrial center, but also as a seat of political power for the British. Mann explains the land tenure system and emphasizes the centrality of land as a major source of wealth, power, and control, especially for the kings who not only derived enormous income from the increasing demand for slaves, but also

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held control over land. The centrality of land became more apparent with the transition from slavery to palm products. Lagosians, according to the author, adapted to changes and new economic opportunities that were open to them as a result of the introduction of legitimate trade. The end of the slave trade led to a reorganization of labor and gave a new perspective to land ownership and the use of land. The use of oral narratives, archival documents, and extensive literature gives this book a level of authenticity. Oral narratives, especially relating to land, are important to reconstruct the economic history of West Africa. However, Mann did not appear to have conducted enough interviews to have a good overall, inclusive representation of the entire society, which needed to include additional royal, commoner, and gender commentaries. Since Nigerian oral history is replete on land, slavery, and Lagosian economics, the author should have provided more narratives. A map of Nigeria showing the location of Lagos would have been helpful to a reader unfamiliar with the geography of West Africa as well. Slavery and the Birth of an African City is an original and insightful work. This book is well written and well organized. It is an important guide to the history of the Atlantic slave trade, to the economic history of Lagos, and to the intervention of the British, especially since 1861 when Lagos was annexed. Overflowing with anthropological, cultural, and historical information, this book will be of interest to general readers and undergraduate and graduate students of West African history and anthropology. Monmouth University

Julius O. Adekunle

Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood. By John Renard. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 346. $24.95.)

Since the seventh-century rise of Islam, literate Muslims have recorded accounts of “Friends of God,” a term signifying men and women whose acts and beliefs set a standard for devotion among the larger society in which they live and die. These individuals are not prophets, but they live exemplary lives, sometimes even communing with the divine through miraculous deeds. John Renard is a professor of theological studies, and in his newest book he examines an impressive range of sources that range from twelfth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Senegal (with stops also in Andalusia, Indonesia, and Morocco), showing that this body of literature is not anchored to a specific time or place.

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The author rightfully advises his scholarly readers to begin this book by reading part three, which offers a useful discussion of the methodological questions for students of such a genre of literature. “Hagiography,” Renard writes, “is not historiography” (247). And yet, in chapters ten and eleven he offers a perceptive set of questions and analyses that make this book an ideal reading in graduate seminars that focus not only on Islamic studies, but also on methodological issues in history, anthropology, or religious studies tout court. It shows a twenty-first-century English speaker how to understand these accounts of saintly people in Arab-speaking, non-Western societies over the past thirteen centuries. The substance of the book is found in parts one and two, which offer a comprehensive overview of this multilayered body of literature that includes more than twenty primary sources as well as a host of descriptive secondary sources. Part one consists of five chapters that show that these hagiographies adhere to a narrative arc encompassing all stages of life and religious experience. These are: birth, conversion, dreams, miracles, and death. The four chapters of part two survey the sociopolitical significance of these saints. Parts one and two whet the curiosity of scholarly readers, pointing them towards new research projects. Given the vast number of times and places treated in this book, Renard cannot place each saint’s story within his or her historical context. Thus, when Friends of God, like Ahmad Yasawi, provide wheat to the poor, the author cannot analyze why there was such a pressing need for charitable distributions of a filling starch in Central Asia at that time (38). In a like manner, the same can be said for other stories in this book, which suggests that there is interesting work to be done on the topics of women or urban trades. In truth, the author expresses a desire to see “hagiographical narratives . . . liberated from the tyranny of bland facticity,” but Renard’s book provides evidence of the rich data available in them (257). Clearly, these sources provide untold amounts of information about the social and economic conditions of the period in which they were written. For this reason, this book should be a staple on library shelves and on graduate reading lists. Purdue University

Stacy E. Holden

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. By Ibn Warraq. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007. Pp. 556. $29.95.)

The lives of the late Edward Said and of Ibn Warraq (pen name) exhibit a few parallels. Born in British-ruled Palestine, Said was in his midteens when his Arab

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parents sent him to a New England prep school. He remained in the United States and taught comparative literature at Columbia University for several decades. Born in British-ruled India, Warraq began his schooling at a Pakistani madrasah, but his father soon sent him abroad to acquire a British education. Said’s family was Christian, but he became a secular humanist and agnostic. Although he never was a Muslim, he championed Palestinian and Arab nationalisms that increasingly acquired an Islamic identity. Warraq’s family was Muslim, but he, too, became a secular humanist and agnostic. In 1995 he published a book called Why I Am Not a Muslim. There are also major differences between their points of view. Said is known for his criticism of the West, particularly in his famous book Orientalism [1978], while Warraq correctly titles his new book Defending the West. With scorn and personal insult, Warraq criticizes Orientalism as badly researched and even more badly argued. According to Warraq, Said smears the reputation of Western scholars who devoted their lives to a study of the Middle East and South Asia, the so-called Orientalists. They were not lackeys of European imperialism, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, who portrayed the Oriental “other” as unchanging and passive, and so naturally inferior to the virile, creative West. He is outraged when Said declares that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (32). What angers Warraq most of all is that, he argues, Said encouraged self-pity and victimhood among Muslims that gave them an excuse not to recognize and correct their own failings. Warraq had planned to compile an anthology that would dispute Orientalism. This original plan explains the organization into short sections, the abundant quotations, and over a hundred pages called “Orientalism in Painting and Sculpture, Music and Literature.” However, only a small part of Warraq’s book directly analyzes Said’s work. Mostly, with a convert’s passion, Warraq defends and praises Western civilization. Its values—rationalism, universalism, self-criticism— contrast, he says, with the Islamic world—self-satisfied, narrow-minded, and lacking in curiosity about non-Islamic peoples and times. Although enthusiastic about the West, Warraq has only contempt for the French intellectuals associated with postmodernism who denied the possibility of objective truth and who despised their own heritage. Drawing upon these “confidence tricks,” Said creates “a master fraud that bound American academics and Middle East tyrants in unstated bonds of anti-American complicity” (247). Warraq describes Said’s tone as one of “intellectual terrorism” (18). Is Warraq beating the proverbial dead horse? Was Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies [2006] sufficient refutation?

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Perhaps Said’s Orientalism is a book that survives attack because readers like its thesis. Miami University

David M. Fahey

THE AMERICAS The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War. By William L. Barney. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv, 245. $22.00.)

Professional historians of the Civil War have long recognized that slavery, as Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, was “somehow the cause of the war.” The key word is “somehow”; the consensus on the centrality of slavery has opened up many new questions, especially with regard to the Upper South, where the secession movement had little strength before April 1861. Why were slaveholders in states like North Carolina so reluctant to secede, and even more significant, why did they fight so loyally for the Confederacy, not just with their muskets and swords during the war, but with their pens and votes afterward? This author seeks answers to these questions in the life of a single western North Carolina farmer, slaveholder, and soldier named Walter Lenoir. Lenoir was one of eight children reared in a house grandly named “Fort Defiance” by his grandfather, a Revolutionary War hero. The Lenoirs owned slaves but were never comfortable with the practice. Walter was particularly disenchanted with the institution, which he considered both immoral and troublesome, and in 1860 he traveled to Minnesota to find a place where he could farm in freedom. He disliked punishing his slaves and tried to avoid selling them, but could not bring himself to give up the human property that made possible his life as an upper-class landowner. He opposed secession, but when Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion after Fort Sumter was fired upon, he enlisted in the 37th North Carolina infantry regiment, fought at Second Bull Run, and was seriously wounded at Ox Hill in 1862. Walter Lenoir was transformed by his wartime experience. From the moment the war began, he conceived of it as a defense of his homeland against Northern aggression, rather than a war to defend slavery. He found an identity as a soldier, and longed to rejoin the ranks even after his wounded leg was amputated. He came close to undergoing a religious conversion, and instead adopted the cause of the Confederacy as the subject of his lifelong devotion. After the war, he accepted emancipation as a relief from the burden of caring for slaves but resisted the idea that black (or poor white) people should share any of the political and social

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authority that he and other landowners had monopolized before the war. The reluctant slaveholder had become a diehard Confederate. In The Making of a Confederate, the author addresses important issues— including the relationship between slaveholding and secession, the causes of Confederate defeat, the surprising prevalence of white land tenancy before Reconstruction, and the workings of postwar memory—by examining a single case in clear, enthralling detail. This is a highly readable book, with scholarly apparatus wisely limited to brief essays at the end of each chapter. The author does not attempt to provide universal answers for the large questions he raises, but instead offers a beautifully crafted example of brick-in-the-wall historiography that answers those questions convincingly for one person, leaving to other historians the task of arguing whether Lenoir was the rule or the exception. East Carolina University

Gerald J. Prokopowicz

Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. By Terry Bouton. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. v, 332. $29.95.)

The author’s engrossing and passionate neo-Progressive analysis of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania depicts “a struggle between the ordinary many and the elite few”—and the “few” won (14). The book is divided into three sections. “The Rise of Democracy (1763–1776)” describes a prewar consensus in which rich and poor Pennsylvanians supported a democratic polity that shrunk the gap between rich and poor. “Confronting the Counter-Revolution (1776–1787)” chronicles the elite’s challenge to economic and political democracy. In a “stunning reversal,” the “moneyed men” espoused values that had “far more in common with the beliefs of their former British masters than they did with the ideals of 1776” (61). “Taming Democracy (1787– 1799)” focuses on the state Constitution of 1790 and the Whiskey and Fries Rebellions to document the failure to halt the trend toward elite rule. Terry Bouton adds richness to a story that has been told before. Giving ordinary Pennsylvanians a voice, he reminds readers that most Americans did not share the vision of the “founders” and that many risked their lives to preserve their ideals. He enables readers to appreciate the ...