By Stephen J. Gould.
Norton. 347 pp. 119.95
By Michael Adas.
Cornell. 430 pp. $29.95
all Muslims through- out their 1400-year-old history: Who is the rightful ruler of an Islamic state? What constitutes a proper state and soci- ety under Islam? And, indeed, is there one and only one correct conception of state, society, and leadership under Is- lam? The questions are far from aca-demic. To many of the one billion Mus- lims living today, they are often matters of life or death.
Our contributors here offer three ap- proaches to the ongoing Islamic debate. Bernard Lewis considers...
when there is a crisis-when hostages are taken, or a bloody jihad is waged, or an ayatollah pronounces a death sentence upon a "blasphemous" novelist. Few Westerners recognize that beneath such head- line events lie ancient, tangled conflicts that go to the heart of Islamic faith and civilization, often threatening to divide it.
One such conflict-between worldly and spiritual authority-finds apt expres- sion in the 16th-century Persian painting featured on this page. It depicts an early...
Ever since they made a revolution and seized power 10 years ago, Iran's clerical leaders have considered themselves to be engaged in a unique experiment to create an exemplary Islamic state, based on Islamic law and superior to both capitalism and communism. "We should be a model to the world," Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former speaker of Iran's Majles, or parliament, said tw...
-including the some 40 nations in which Muslims constitute the majority of the population-is a rich assort- ment of peoples and cultures. It is united, in tact, only by the prevalence of poverty. Beyond the borders of the desert oil king- doms, Muslim societies are poor and devel- oping, confined by their lack of political, economic, and military resources. They face the ample, simultaneous difficulties of modernization: sprawling, densely popu-
'
lated cities immobilized by traffic; u...
As recently as 15 years ago, no serious stu- dent of social and political change in the Middle East, North Africa, or South and South- east Asia paid much attention to Islam. It was obviously the religion professed by the over- whelming majority of the population~ in many nations of these regions, and no doubt it had once provided the framework of ideas and sen- timents through which Muslims interpreted their own actions and institutions. But that was history. As an ideology in the modern world,...
It is either celebrated or conceded that ture, matted-down light hair, plain specta- John Dewey is the most influential Amer- cles, drooping mustache, and starched ican philosopher of the 20th century. No collar, Dewey looked more like a Victorian other philosopher in this century, Richard businessman from the Midwest than a theo- Rorty has observed, so freed philosophy retician of metaphysics and a political activ- from its age-old metaphysical concerns and ist. But in habit if not in appearance,...
WQ AUTUMN 1989
Reading is reading is reading, as Gertrude Stein might have said. Medieval monks reading the Bible aloud, a subway commuter scanning the New York Daily News, Mao Zedong perusing Marx's Capital-all, it may seem, are engaged in the same activity. But is it the same? Robert Darnton thinks not. Reading has a history, he argues. Here he examines the act of reading in Europe and Amer- ica as it has changed over four centuries. How people read can be more revealing than what they read....
6 per- cent per year. Researchers at MIT calculate that "the aver-age person would have to take a flight every day for the next 29,000 years before being in- volved in a fatal crash."
True, the authors say, re- ports of "near collisions" have jumped recently (up 26 per- cent between 1986 and 1987).
"Religious Change In America."
Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 02138. 133 pp. $25.
Author: Andrew M. Greeley
"When the Social Science Re- search Council i...