729 Reviews of Books into account, so that the irony of the Joseph sura was more fully drawn out (Irony is indeed a vehicle of anagnorisis) At Q 12:31, Joseph’s identity is (temporarily) further muddled (the more to set up the eventual master recognition scene) in one of the more powerful representations of (as it happens, false) recognition in the sura This is when the ladies attending Zulaykha’s salon are so bedazzled by Joseph’s beauty that they falter, slicing their hands instead of the oranges they were peeling, and exclaim: “This is no man (bashar), rather a noble angel (malak karīm)” At Q 12:96, “the [anonymous] bearer of good news (bashīr)” brought Joseph’s shirt to the languishing Jacob and, according to Joseph’s earlier instructions, laid it upon his face that his sight be restored Vision is useful in the act of recognition, but it is not the only sense that can be used In the several discussions of the verb ʿarafa, most frequently in tandem with its opposite and the other half of the dis- tinctive “minimal pair” of Islamic language, maʿrūf and munkar, much of great value is learned about the various forms of the root and its basic relevance to the spirit and form of Quranic anagnorisis One derivative of the root, however, is never mentioned, namely, ʿarf “scent” Though it does not occur in the Quran, it may be thought to waft into the story of Joseph on the wings of the word for scent that is used: rīḥ at Q 12:94. The inevitable connection between knowledge and enlightenment and the “pro- phetic sense” of smell would thus be all the more emphasized One is mightily tempted to see Abū Zayd, the picaresque hero of the maqāmāt genre, as a personi- fication—Kennedy would possibly prefer, synecdoche—for the wily, shape shifting, deceitful, truthful, complex, simple, simultaneously veiling and unveiling, sympathetic and hostile intellectual organon known as Arabic grammar After all, his famous “son,” the hapless, ubiquitous, and long-suffering Zayd of grammatical explication, is possibly the one most needful of deliverance from such unusually cruel pilpulistic manipulation (see p 249) This striking and delightful recognition is a shining testa- ment to the scholarship, knowledge, acumen, oceanic reading, and story-telling ability of the author; to the nature of Arabic and, as it happens, the centrality of the Quran to all literary and cultural endeavor pursued in the Islamic world; to an overactive readerly imagination on the part of this reviewer; or to a combination of all four Whatever the case may be, it comes from this tremendous book, to which justice is not done here Uva uvam videndo varia fit TODD LAWSON UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO L’Ésotérisme shi‘ite: Ses racines et ses prolongements / Shi‘i Esotericism: Its Roots and Develop- ments Edited by M. A. AMIR-MOEZZI, M. DE CILLIS, D. DE SMET, and O. MIR-KASIMOV Biblio- thèque de l’École des Hautes Etudes, sciences religieuses, vol 177 Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 2016 Pp v + 870 €95 (paper) This most welcome volume, brought to dazzling fruition by the leading scholar of Ithnā ʿasharī (“Twelver”) Shiʿism, offers the student of both Shiʿi and Sunni Islam a veritable cornucopia of riches concerning a topic still too little recognized and explored, particularly in English-speaking scholarly circles It provides much new material destined to disturb our comfortable, not to say stale, notions of how the dynamics of communal identities have worked and continue to work themselves out in the case of Islam, a tradition for which it has long been accepted that the categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” simply do not apply, but for which no reasonable alternate approach has gained univer- sal traction Marshall Hodgson’s brilliant model of “styles of piety” has inspired two generations of Islamicists, yet seems for the most part to have remained something of an esoteric insight all on its own; those who share it congregate in something of a “spiritual and anonymous church” Further, this collection’s topics and methods of exploration will also illumine problems of belief and doctrine with regard to sources and settings How Sunni Islam is in some sense the creation of Shiʿism—and vice versa—and how their mutual study in contemporary scholarship is a non-negotiable desideratum are issues that receive much suggestive exposition in this book, though, it should be hastily added, this is