Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam.

• Author: Meri, Josef W.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam. Edited by RICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH. Giorgio Levi della Vida Conferences. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. Pp. viii + 119. $49.95.

The prestigious Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award in Islamic Studies, named after the late University of California, Los Angeles scholar of early Islam, has since 1967 been awarded to seventeen eminent scholars of Islamic history and civilization, including Robert Brunschvig, Joseph Schacht, Francesco Gabrieli, Gustave E. von Grunebaum, S. D. Goitein, Franz Rosenthal, Albert Hourani, W. Montgomery Watt, Fazlur Rahman, Charles Issawi, Annemarie Schimmel, Andre Miquel, Ehsan Yarsharter, Oleg Grabar, and, most recently, Andre Raymond, and Josef van Ess.

The present volume honors the fourteenth recipient, George Makdisi, who has devoted much of his long and distinguished career to studying Islamic law and thought, most notably the Hanbali madhhab and the madrasa (teaching college) and its relationship to the university. The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the collection of essays is select in its scope, focusing mainly in intellectual and literary traditions. Notwithstanding, this noteworthy collection of six essays, presented at a conference in 1993, puts forward fresh ideas concerning the interplay of religion and culture in medieval Islam and, on the whole, represents a significant contribution to this important area of study.

The first of these essays is George Makdisi's masterfully composed "Religion and Culture in Classical Islam and the Christian West," which highlights a central aspect of his many years of research on the subject of the university in the Christian West and the teaching college (madrasa) in the Islamic East. Makdisi demonstrates the influence of Islamic scholasticism, as it evolved during the ninth century, followed by the founding in the Islamic east of the madrasa in the eleventh century, and the development of the university in the West with the founding of academic centers in Bologna and Paris. Like the madrasas, whose masters possessed the authority to grant licenses (ijdzas) to their students, the universities of Bologna and Paris had the authority to grant degrees. Makdisi shows similarities and differences in the founding of the teaching colleges in Islam, and their purpose and structure. He concludes that the Islamic model inspired the evolution of the university as we know it today. Makdisi's findings will...