Encounters with Islam
Studies in the Anthropology of Muslim Cultures

Offers an interdisciplinary anthropological study of the Islamic world – exploring art, law, and religion – to challenge existing stereotypes.

Lawrence Rosen (Author)

9781009389037, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 September 2023

256 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]