Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Vol. 2. The Contemporary Period by AndrewRippinReview by: Moojan MomenJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jul., 1995), pp. 277-278Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britainand IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183019 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 02:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Cambridge University Press and Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.14 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:40:12 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews of Books 277

assumption that the Wahh?b?s cannot have changed in their relationship to the Sunn? mainstream

since the days of their first expansion. In essence the difference she perceives is that for Dahl?n they

must still be the "bad guys" they originally were, whereas for ?l?si they must always have been

the "

good guys "

they now are (p. 165). There is much in her analysis that is illuminating in this vein.

Michael Cook

Muslims: their religious beliefs and practices. Vol. 2. The contemporary period. By Andrew

Rippin. (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices.) pp. xii, 171. London and New York,

Routledge, 1993. ?35.00 (cloth), ?16.00 (paperback).

This book is an attempt to provide a general survey of Islam for a reader trying to understand

Islam as a religious force in the modern world. Given the size of the book, it has obviously been

important for the author to focus on specific areas of modern Islam rather than trying to survey the

whole field. The author has looked at a number of themes such as the life of Muhammad and the

Qur'?n, and surveyed the ways in which modern Muslim writers have used these themes as a

background to the general question of how to cope with the problems that modernity poses for

religion. Rippin has looked at a number of patterns of response to modernity including modernism,

radical Islam, traditionalism, and neo-traditionalism and explains how these have manifested

themselves in the Islamic world in the last hundred years. The last few chapters of the book look at

two further areas, the impact of feminism within the Islamic world and the ways in which traditional

religious practices have been adapted to the modern world.

The above, brief description of the book portrays both its strengths and weaknesses. The book is

strong on the intellectual development of Islam in modern times. But one may question whether the

thoughts of the intellectuals portrayed in the book have affected any more than a tiny fraction of

the world's Muslim population. I would guess that if one were to do a survey of the Islamic world,

less than one in a thousand would even have heard of, much less known anything about the ideas

of, such intellectuals as Mohammed Arkoun and Shabbir Akhtar who figure prominently in the

book. The one Islamic thinker who has gripped the imagination of the entire Islamic world is

Ayatullah Khomeini and he is only mentioned briefly in passing in the book.

The key factor to be considered, it seems to me, is not what the intellectuals have debated about

Islam in the modern world but what ordinary Muslims have done as their traditional cultures come

up against the demands and pressures of modernity. Islam is above all a religion of actions rather than

theorising. Muslims are defined much more by what they do than by what they believe. This, of

course, is a much more difficult area to classify and to write about and there is much more variety with regard to this across the Islamic world. Rippin has attempted a survey in the last chapter of the

book but the scope of this is very limited.

There are a number of further areas which are of importance and which are ignored or given

insufficient importance in the book. First, there is the area of popular religious practices. However,

much it may be frowned upon by the ulama and the intellectuals, it remains a fact that, whether one

looks at Muslims in the slums of Cairo or the villages of Bangladesh or Indonesia, most of their

interaction with their religion comes at the level of popular religion ; visiting the shrines of saints,

the use of amulets and talismans, even the readings from the Qur'?n which they may listen to are

often being done for semi-magical reasons.

Both Sufism and Sh?'? Islam are given scant attention in the book despite the fact that they affect

the religious lives of many millions of Muslims. In the case of Shf? Islam in particular, I would have

thought that the "average" reader would have wanted some information on this subject, given the

way in which militant Shi'ism in Iran and Lebanon has dominated the news in the last decade.

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.14 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:40:12 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

278 Reviews of Books

We must, however, return to the point that the author was forced to make difficult choices due

to the small size of the book, a factor presumably dictated by the series of which it forms a part. While

one many quibble about the choice made by the author in these circumstances, the way that he has

dealt with what he has chosen to include is both very clear and of high quality. He has blended with

great skill theoretical considerations and actual examples. He has managed to distill the essence of the

main points made by each of the authors that he has chosen and has explained these in a way that

most people will be able to understand, even if their previous knowledge of Islam is limited.

Moojan Momen

The Turkic peoples of the world. Edited by Margaret Bainbridge. pp. xxii, 403, 18 maps.

London and New York, Kegan Paul International, 1993. ,?65.00.

The editor of this useful volume was for many years Lecturer in Turkish at the School of Oriental

and African Studies, where in 1979 she set up the Turkish/Turkic Area Studies Group. In the ten

years until her retirement, she took TASG from strength to strength -

it continues to flourish,

though no longer with a base at SOAS. TASG's major activities have been the production of a

Newsletter (38 issues have now appeared) and a series of one-day seminars, at some of which early

versions of several chapters in this compilation were presented.

The body of the book, after a Historical Introduction by Jean-Paul Roux, consists of sixteen

chapters by different authors on Turkic populations in different countries, including one on Turkic

immigrants in Turkey, and two chapters on immigrants to Australia and Western Europe. There are

no accounts of" native Anatolian Turks "

in Turkey or of immigrants in the USA or the Arab world.

Chapters are of varied length, more or less appropriate to the size and importance of the Turkic

population concerned and the availability of sources on them. The longest chapter, occupying 20 per

cent of the book, describes the Turks in the former Soviet Union, who constitute half the 100 million

or so Turkic population of the world ; while the shortest chapters concern some of the smallest

populations (those in Finland, Romania, Syria). By the criteria of the size and importance of the

Turkic populations, some chapters are distinctly too short (those on Iran, Afghanistan, Bulgaria),

others too long (those on Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Mongolia, immigrants to Australia).

Contributors were given general guidelines and asked to cover history, numbers, distribution,

civil and economic status, facilities for education and communication in the mother tongue, and

religious issues, but the results are far from uniform, ranging from the impressionistic to the highly

statistical. Most chapters are well written and informative. Each ends with a bibliography of further

reading, though these too vary widely in length and coverage, some including only works in

English.

The book, planned soon after the formation of TASG, was a difficult one to assemble and has been

several years in the making. The editor has carefully dated each contribution. Her own brief Preface

is dated 1990 and the Introduction 1986, while the country chapters were written between 1980 and

1989. Some are based on census materials and other sources which are several decades old, but the

authors did not and could not predict the speed at which recent political developments so rapidly

outdated major sections of the volume, notably the substantial chapters on USSR and Yugoslavia,

both written only shortly before these countries ceased to exist.

Despite this unfortunate timing, The Turkic Peoples of the World is a brave, pioneering effort and

does, as it claims, fill an important need. It should meet its admirable if modest objective of increasing

general awareness of one of the world's great peoples. It deserves a wider readership/usership than

it is likely to get at this price (which is despite camera production from a typescript) ; it also deserves

an updated edition -

preferably properly typeset, or at least computer-generated.

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.14 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:40:12 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions