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perfection motivates those who continuously practice recitation. Thus, it is perfection, not necessarily realized by but always hoped for, that makes practice.

Robert Hunt

981Original ArticleBook ReviewsThe Muslim World

Historical Atlas of Islam

By Malise Ruthven with Azim Nanji

Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004

What an atlas should be is not terribly complex. It should be clear, accurate and as informative as possible and, since it is a work of graphics, it is not unfair to ask it to be good to look at and easy to read. The

Historical Atlas of Islam

by Malise Ruthven “with” Azim Nanji (and with a good many others, as appears from the Acknowledgements, p. 204) certainly had all this in mind. How well they were achieved is less simple in the judging.

The body of the

Atlas

combines three major elements: a very generous serving of essays that introduce and then surround and explain the maps; the maps themselves, some double-paged, some single, some a fraction of a page; and finally, graphic material, pictures and photos, to illustrate the matter of the essays. The photos are fine, if occasionally a little random, but the pictorials are not always helpful, and for the usual reasons: illustrating events of early Islamic history with Mughul or Ottoman representations (e.g. p. 26) is not very satisfactory, though better than modern attempts at depicting Sufis in action (p. 59) or, worse, Gustav Doré’s take on Saladin (p. 62).

The essays are generally of high quality, beginning with Ruthven’s contextual introduction (pp. 6–13), a rapid primer on Islam (pp. 14–15) — there is a useful glossary of technical terms in the back of the book — and brief treatments of the physical characteristic of the “Muslim lands” (defined on p. 19 at those countries with more than 50% Muslim population) and of Muslim languages and ethnic groups. There are accompanying maps, of course, and that of the Muslim lands (pp. 18–19) reveals the isolation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Bangladesh alone amidst their non-Muslim neighbors, just as only Ethiopia, Eritrea and Israel float solitary in a Muslim

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sea. The map accompanying “Languages and Peoples of Islam” (pp. 22–23) is far less helpful because the type faces that were intended to distinguish place names, languages and peoples are not that distinct; the category “imperial languages in regional use” wildly underestimates the spread of English as a

lingua franca

, while “French” still clings to Syria, where surely there are now more English speakers than Francophones; and finally, no one apparently speaks “Turkish,” which I could not find on the map.

The maps are the great problem of the

Historical Atlas

, as they probably are of any such. First, some things simply cannot be satisfactorily mapped, like the imprecisions of ancient and medieval military campaigns (e.g., pp. 27, 29), and the longer the period covered, the greater the profusion of arrows pointing this way and that, as on the map of Islamic expansion westward from 650 to 1,485 (pp. 66–67). Another difficulty arises from the presence of too many places and events in a too confined space, notoriously in Palestine/Levant, whether in Crusader times (p. 57) or when Sykes and Picot were doing the mapping (pp. 124–125).

History and geography may have dealt the cartographer a bad hand in those instances, but in others the wound is self-inflicted. Black type does not read well off dark backgrounds (pp. 85, 89), other faces are too light (p. 97), or cramped (pp. 98, 99), and light on light causes New Guinea to disappear into the ambient sea (pp. 106–107). Elsewhere the resolutions are far happier, as in the splendid treatment of the always (cartographically) troubling Balkans (pp. 113, 120, 121) and the legibly attractive map of Central Asia (pp. 94–95). Finally, there are simple lapses, almost inevitable in a work of such complexity, like different spellings of the same place (Zaragoza, p. 66; Saragossa, pp. 68, 69) and describing the Umayyad Caliphate as an “Emirate” in 1000 A.D. (p. 51), but describing a population as “Arabic” (p. 68) is beyond the absolution of the most indulgent reviewer.

In the course of navigating the bumps, I was also enormously informed by the

Historical Atlas of Islam

, and by its maps as well as by its elegant essays. I found particularly illuminating the mapping of the Sufi orders (p. 61), of the military orders in Spain (p. 69) and of the areas of medieval military recruitment (pp. 46–47). The maps of East and West Africa (pp. 71, 73) taught me much I didn’t know, and the words and the cartographic music came harmoniously together in the

Atlas

”

treatment of the Indian Ocean (pp. 76–83).

The last entries in an atlas are always the most problematic. Maps grow more precise in pace with more detailed data, in mapping, for example, the Israeli wars of the 60s and 70s, (pp. 162–163) and the Gulf Wars (pp. 164–165), while keeping abreast with events is almost impossible — high marks here;

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the coverage ends with the Iraqi campaign of April, 2003. But what is equally difficult is the choice of topics to cover and of the material to illustrate them when the past becomes the present. The

Atlas

”

coverage of the modern Muslim diaspora (pp. 161–177, 180–183) is as right as it is predictable, but the inclusion of a couple of once-over-lightly pages on the “Islamic Arts” (pp. 172–173), seems pointless here, as does the space devoted to “Muslim Cinema” (pp. 188–189) and “Internet Use” (pp. 190–191). Two pages on “World Terrorism 2003” (pp. 184–185, with a terrifying photo of the exploding World Trade Center that says far more than the text) was another impossible task, and the accompanying map (pp. 186–187), which said everything and so nothing, was not terribly helpful, and that for “Architectural and Archeological Sites,” with its jumble of icons (and its inexplicable omission of the Cordoba

Mezquita

) was even less so.There is a great deal of learning and even elegance packed into the

essays and graphics of the

Historical Atlas of Islam

, and at an affordable price. But there is matter too that provoked at least one reader’s squinting and puzzlement, particularly in the maps. Essay writing is a more advanced art than cartography, I suppose, but that same reader at least has a piece of advice for future Idrisis: bigger, bolder and better, please, and yes, sometimes less

is

more. And good luck with Palestine and the Levant.

Frank Peters

New York University New York, New York

981Original ArticleBook ReviewsThe Muslim World

The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy

Edited by Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Studies on Arabic philosophy in the West have a very long history. This history goes back to the beginning of the twelfth century C.E. with the translation of scientific and philosophical works produced in the Islamic world from Arabic to Latin. It is commonly agreed that the first history of Arabic philosophy in Western languages written by a scholar of Arabic and based on relatively original sources is T. J. de Boer’s

Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam