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lukescalone's review
2.0
This is a really weird book, reminding me more of scholars whose articles have been collected after they died and putting them in a single text. Michael Brett is very much still alive.
There isn't a single theme that unites all of these essays, except that they are studies of the medieval Maghrib and rely quite heavily on Ibn Khaldun's thought. Yet, little written here is explicitly about Ibn Khaldun, and the title of the book seems to be a bit of a misnomer. Part 1 can be unified under the theme of Islamization, Part 2 under Arabization, and Part 3 under the urban history of the eastern Maghrib. There is no general argument that can be pulled out of the collection.
The major strength here is that it collects a number of Brett's works in one place, and it saves a lot of effort in scouring these articles, as some are published in journals that most (American) libraries do not have widespread access to: al-Qantara and the Cahiers de Tunisie are the two most significant examples of this, and one essay was published in a collection celebrating the 70th birthday of Mohamed Talbi. One essay here had not previously been published, "The Lamp of the Almohads: Illumination as a Political Idea in Twelfth-Century Morocco," but I don't know that it would be worth getting the whole collection for the one essay.
There isn't a single theme that unites all of these essays, except that they are studies of the medieval Maghrib and rely quite heavily on Ibn Khaldun's thought. Yet, little written here is explicitly about Ibn Khaldun, and the title of the book seems to be a bit of a misnomer. Part 1 can be unified under the theme of Islamization, Part 2 under Arabization, and Part 3 under the urban history of the eastern Maghrib. There is no general argument that can be pulled out of the collection.
The major strength here is that it collects a number of Brett's works in one place, and it saves a lot of effort in scouring these articles, as some are published in journals that most (American) libraries do not have widespread access to: al-Qantara and the Cahiers de Tunisie are the two most significant examples of this, and one essay was published in a collection celebrating the 70th birthday of Mohamed Talbi. One essay here had not previously been published, "The Lamp of the Almohads: Illumination as a Political Idea in Twelfth-Century Morocco," but I don't know that it would be worth getting the whole collection for the one essay.
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