Customer Reviews

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford Paperback Reference)

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I bought this dictionary hoping that it would be a useful reference for a graduate course dealing with the relationship between Christianity and Islam during the early years of Islam. I have found it to be spotty and inconsistent.

For example, I wanted to know the dates of the Abbasid dynasty. I tried looking up "Abbasid." There is no such entry. I tried looking at the timeline at the end of the dictionary. There, the first reference to Abbasids is in the entry for 744-750 (p. 352): "Third Muslim civil war and defeat of Umayyads by Abbasids." There is no statement that this marks the beginning of the Abbasid Dynasty. However, the entry for the year 661 (p. 351) does include the information that "Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan founds Umayyad Dynasty." Why is there no comparable statement about the founding of the Abbasid Dynasty?

I decided to see if the dictionary had an entry for the Umayyads. Yes, it does (p. 326). This makes all the harder to understand why there is no entry for the Abbasids.

Returning to the timeline, the second entry that mentions the Abbasids (750-850) mentions three caliphs of this dynasty: al-Mahdi, Harun al-Rashid and al-Mamun. Does the body of the dictionary have entries for each of these men? No, yes (alphabetized under "Harun"), yes (alphabetized under "Mamun"). I tried looking for al-Mahdi under "al-" and "Mahdi." There are a few entries beginning with "al-," but not nearly as many as would be required were all of them listed consistently. I looked under "Mahdi." There I found an entry for Mahdi as an honorific applied to Muhammad and the first four caliphs; one for Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi (d. 1959); one for Sadiq al-Mahdi (b. 1936); and one for Mahdists which just has a cross-reference to the following entry, Mahdiyyah, which turns out to be a messianic movement founded in Sudan in the late 19th century. Obviously none of these was relevant to my search to the al-Mahdi mentioned in the timeline. I finally resorted to Wikipedia, where I learned that the full name of this caliph was Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi. I tried looking under "Muhammad" and "ibn Mansur" in the dictionary, but with no result.

I noticed that the name of one of the Prophet's wives is given as "Aisha" in the timeline (p. 351, years 656-661). When I looked her name up in the body of the dictionary, I found it spelled "Aishah" (p. 12).

Moving beyond people to things, I found an entry for "chador," the Persian term for the full-length veil worn for modesty by conservative Muslim women, but the Arabic term "abaya" is missing. There is an entry for "hijab" and it is defined as if it were an abaya. However, hijab is actually used as a more general term referring to various kinds of clothing and behavior intended to preserve the modesty of both women and men, not just the full-length veil.

In conclusion, this dictionary does have a large number of terms useful for understand Islamic culture and history. However, it lacks many terms that it should have and it shows editorial inconsistency. At the least, a reader will have to supplement this book with others.

Islam is getting close to growing almost as fast as Christianity. Terms and doctrines of Islam are important to know an understand. And in this book one receives valuable and cogent information on countless muslim concepts and terms. a must for an apologist or a pastor.
Aquinas noted: "On the other hand, those who founded sects committed to erroneous doctrines proceeded in a way that is opposite to this. The point is clear in the case of Mohammed. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teachings also contain precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure... Mohammed said that he was sent in the power of his arms--which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise man, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Mohammed forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. . . . he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly" (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles).
Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs
or the apologetic book 'One Way to God: Christian Philosophy and Presuppositional Apologetics Examine World Religions' -- both on amazon and both discuss the problems with islam.

Wiki is faster, easier, more in-depth and well free. If its for a class, trust me wiki is all you need.