ISLAM AND THE ARAB WORLD

This large-format book delivers a mass of illustrations (480: 160 in color, the others photos, drawings, and maps) which are mostly unfamiliar and a delight in themselves. The drawings and maps accompany the text; the color reproductions and photos are grouped at the end of each chapter, and form a unit with it. In his productive control of the text, editor Bernard Lewis of Princeton matches Pauline Baynes' management of the design. Scholars in Europe, Israel, and the US combine to give the reader a sense of the vitality and richness of the Islamic tradition via the story of at least "the central areas of Islamic greatness"—the book's best definition of its focus. (Cf. the title: almost nothing is said of Malaysia and Indonesia, despite their large Muslim populations, but notice is taken of Muslims in non-Arab Iran, Spain, and India.) There are descriptive and historical pieces on Islamic music, science, literature, warfare, and architecture. Gardens figure in the last as they do in "Cities and Citizens" by Oleg Graber of Harvard which relates the street patterns and layout of dwellings in the heyday of the Muslim bourgeoisie to social structure. In turn, Fritz Meier of Basel University understands religious devotion as well as its institutional consequences; his chapter on the Sufi tradition is both appealing and realistic. Most of the book treats of the long period of Muslim expansion in the past, but its always lurking preoccupation with the present surfaces in the two concluding chapters. The success of Muslim arms had been felt as a confirmation of the rightness of Islam, and the encroachment of Christian Europe upon Muslim lands presented a crisis of consciousness which remains to be resolved. In its ample and vigorous presentation of a subject many Americans want to know better, this is a book for students and general reference as much as for entertainment. Brief outline of Islamic history, chronology, select bibliography.