Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History.

• Author: NAJIAR, FAUZI M.
• Position: Review

Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History. By TAMARA SONN. OXFORD and New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xi + 206. $39.95.

This book is primarily a translation, with introduction and notes, of Bandali Jawzi's Min Tarikh al-Harakat al-Fikriyya fi al-Islam, published in Jerusalem in 1928. Bandali Saliba Jawzi was born in Jerusalem on July 2, 1871. Orphaned in childhood, he was schooled in Greek Orthodox monasteries in Jerusalem and Lebanon. In 1891, he moved to Moscow, where he pursued his theological studies at the Theological Academy. He later transferred to Qazan, where he taught Arabic while continuing his studies. After a short visit to Palestine in 1900, he returned to Qazan, married a Russian woman, and lectured at the University until 1920, when he joined the faculty of the University of Azerbaijan. It was during a sojourn in the Middle East that he wrote his major work. He died in Baku in 1942. In Russia, Jawzi became enamored of socialism, an ideological orientation that permeates his history of intellectual movements in Islam.

In an introduction and commentary, Tamara Sonn, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, discusses the political and intellectual environment in which Jawzi wrote. It was the period of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century Islamic reform, dominated by the thought of Muhammad Abduh, and his attempt to reinterpret Islamic principles in terms of modern science and technology. Jawzi's hermeneutics, "based on a recognition that all texts, including religious and historical documents, are the result of human interpretation, and that interpretations are inevitably influenced by the milieux in which they are produced" (p. 7), are, like Islamic reform, rooted in ijtihad, the liberal source of Islamic law. Jawzi's analysis of Islamic intellectual movements "is offered not only as a corrective to orientalism but to Muslims' misapprehension of their own heritage" (p. 44). With the best intentions, Sonn presents Jawzi as a forerunner of Edward Said, with an affinity to postmodernist writers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

In a short introduction to his book, entitled "The Unity of Social Laws," Jawzi takes issue with Western historians who denied that the nations of the East could ever have a "history" in the sense it is understood by European scholars. They attribute this failure to understand history to religion, autocratic political systems...