Customer Reviews

Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse

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This is the best and most informative book on early Islam. It is beautifully written and more sophisticated than anything that has been written on the subject so far. In contrast to the common scholarship on that period, Bamyeh stresses social science perspective over philology, and argues against the new revisionist historians by emphasizing how the origins of Islam could be understood with a close reading of the classical litereature of the period and the Qur'an. The book, I think, successfully reveals the "inner logic" of the historical period, rather than superimpose 20th century perspectives on it. This is done with remarkable sensitivity to the sources. Few books combine so well discussions of poetry, economic history, and tribal politics. This is a truly unique book in its field, and is well-worth reading.

For its style and method, this work belongs on the same shelf as postmodern or critical theory authors so trendy of late. In fact, though the book is not long, even readers already well acquainted with this kind of theorization will find the book a real slog to get through. Bamyeh's writing is often opaque or abstruse, poorly organized and makes frequent references to texts he does not adequately clarify with examples or citations. Worse still, Bamyeh has inherited none of critical theorists' caution about grand intellectual projects. His ambitions are sweeping. He sets out to write a social history of the emergence of Islam uniting, as the title suggests, psychological, economic and structural analysis of ancient Arab society. In a sense, then, he wants to outdo Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Though his approach is novel and therefore one of the attractive things about the piece, ultimately the evidentiary reed he bases this edifice on cannot bear the weight. He limits himself almost exclusively to the elaborate interpretation of a narrow selection of poetic texts and the Qur'an. The insights he makes into these texts are often surprisingly penetrating, particularly those related to the links between environment and economy and their correspondence to the psyche and religious thought. Overall, however, these insights and the texts they are based on are insufficient to support his far-flung conclusions.