Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society.

• Author: Petry, Carl F.

The appearance of a comprehensive treatment of a social phenomenon, wide in its sweep and complex in its ramifications, stimulates more than passing interest. That the author of this work did not live to see the finished product of his labors reach its audience is more than a personal tragedy. While presenting an imposing body of information in a lucidly organized format, Michael Dols engages in a series of extended conversations with his readers about the myriad issues of interpretation relative to his data. Scholars capable of such broad familiarity with these issues are all too rare in our field. Dols' Majnun will be admired as an inspiring model of reflective analysis that addresses a "big issue." Indeed, barring the discovery of new sources, one is hard pressed to envision a study that will supersede it. In this sense, the publication of Majnun attests to an individual's triumphant surmounting of mortal infirmity (with due acknowledgment of his assistant's contribution that can only be surmised as exceptional). Yet as Dols' editor herself notes, this book will serve to remind the scholarly community of the works envisioned by Dols that will now remain only inchoate ideas he shared sporadically with his colleagues.

One is tempted to speculate on the intimidating problems of organization Dols confronted as he arranged the copious source materials he had collected on the subject of insanity as it was perceived by physicians, logicians, magicians, theologians, exegetes, and jurists from Hellenistic times to the High Middle Ages in the Islamic world. Ultimately, Dols opted for an encyclopedic approach, in which he could lay out his material in a retrievable fashion, readily accessible for back referencing by his readers. But Dols did not confine himself to dry outlines chronologically organized. The book includes lengthy quotations from the primary writers he examined to give the reader more than a brief taste of their sentiments. And Dols provides his own analytical assessments of these quotations. The result is a richly nuanced presentation of factual information from primary sources, augmented by insightful commentary that provides the reader with a fascinating historical experience.

Dols proceeds from the foundation of systematic reasoning about the phenomena of insanity, "madness," and melancholia that both Christian and Muslim thinkers would later incorporate into their own definitions and regimens of healing - the corpus of medical...