TAMARA SONN, Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Pp. 224.

Extract

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the colonization of most of the Arab world by Western powers during the first part of the 20th century, Arab intellectuals have been searching for answers to the many political and social questions—indeed, dilemmas—the Arab world has been facing. The appearance of communism at the beginning of the last century, embodying both an agenda for social justice and a Marxist methodology for historical analysis, appealed to many of them as a possible answer to these questions. Since then, many attempts have been made to show that there is compatibility between Islam and Marxist socialism—or, at least, that there is no incompatibility. The book under consideration, Min tarikh al-harakat al-fikriyyah fi-l-islam (The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam), is one of these attempts. Its author is considered by Professor Tamara Sonn, the translator of this book from the original Arabic, to be the first Arab to adopt the Marxist methodology in analyzing Islamic history. “Bandali Jawzi's work is . . . historically significant as the first full-scale Marxist analysis of the nature and development of Islamic though” (p. 16).