AHR Review Roundtable The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam In an effort to enliven the review section of the AHR, we have been experimenting with new ways of evalu- ating scholarship of all kinds. In a number of instances, we have asked several scholars to review a single book or film, in order to bring a variety of critical views to bear on issues of historical importance. Our April 2019 issue, for example, presented four distinctive reviews of Michael A. Gomez’s African Dominion; in the April 2020 AHR, four scholars offered critical appraisals of Adel Manna’s Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956; most recently, the December 2020 issue featured four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States. Here we group together seven distinctive reviews of The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, itself an edited reference work consisting of twenty-eight essays cov- ering a wide range Islamic teaching, practice, and so- cial and political life from before the religion’s birth in the seventh century until the present. Convened by Hatsuki Aishima, a scholar of modern Islam based at Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology, the seven reviews are followed by a response from Armando Sal- vatore (McGill University), one of the volume’s three editors. ARMANDO SALVATORE,ROBERTO TOTTOLI, and BABAK RAHIMI, editors. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018. Pp. xviii, 667. Cloth $199.99. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam is a joint venture between two sociologists, Armando Salvatore and Babak Rahimi, and an Islamologist, Roberto Tottoli, to develop sociological and global perspectives on histori- cal developments of the Islamicate ecumene and thereby to introduce new paradigms to the study of Is- lamic history. Although Wiley Blackwell markets this volume as a reference work, its scope is much more am- bitious. For instance, in a highly imaginative piece, Ca- terina Bori employs the literature of Islamic legal responses (fatwa) to demonstrate how scholarly elites negotiated with the ordinary people in order to establish their authority over Islamic knowledge transmission (chap. 14). Her contribution fully captures the theo- retical and methodological ambitions of this volume. Editors of this volume propose substantive engage- ment with Marshall Hodgson’s project to situate Islam in world history, and they invite readers to reflect on the question of Islam as “a distinctive type of ‘civilizing process’ in history” (1). Indeed, the publication of this volume coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of Mar- shall Hodgson’s premature death in 1968. In order to liberate Islamic history from the Orientalist legacy and the geopolitics of the 1960s, Hodgson redefined the ana- lytical framework of the Islamicate ecumene from the Middle East to the regions between two rivers, the Nile and Oxus (Amu Darya in Central Asia). Following Hodgson’s approach, the contributors focus on historical developments across this region, and there are no chap- ters focused on Islam in Africa, Southeast Asia, or Eu- rope. At the same time, the editors promise that the chapters will showcase a theoretically informed history of Islam that will facilitate our understanding of “a com- plex-cum-civilization the knowledge of which is essen- tial for making sense of the wider transcivilizational dy- namics of the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere” (xvi). 199 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/126/1/199/6244046 by McGill University Library user on 06 May 2021