LAWRENCE ROSEN, The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Pp. 247. $24.00 cloth

Extract

The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life explores the shifting social, political, and cultural concepts of a contemporary North African Muslim community, extrapolating it to the rest of the Arab/Islamic world. Rosen uses for the most part his ethnographic experience, which goes back more than three decades in the Middle Atlas town of Sefrou as well as in other Moroccan environments. Stuck in his old paradigm of the “negotiating situated individual,” he reshelves his data, remaps it to include contemporary themes, and restructures “his” Moroccan society, with Sefrou still as its microcosm.