Full Product Details
Author: Leor Halevi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231188678
ISBN 10: 0231188676
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 16 February 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Halevi's work contributes to the larger understanding of how Islamic reform in this period was often driven through the historical narrative of Rida as a reformer, illustrating a bottom-up process. * Arab Studies Quarterly * This excellent book is paradigm shifting. . . Esseential. * Choice * Halevi sheds light on Islam's relationship with modernity by offering an account of how Islamic revivalists first responded to modern transformations through religious and legal rulings. * Middle East Journal * An outstanding work that sets a new standard for the writing of modern Islamic intellectual history...this book will prove of enduring interest to researchers in Islamic law and modern Islamic thought, historians of the late imperial and early nation-state Muslim worlds, and students of the processes of globalization more generally. * American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences * This is a remarkable intervention by a pioneering scholar of Islamic law and material culture. Focusing on Rashid Rida, a leading light of modern Islamic reform, it highlights the material entanglements that catalyzed his legal rulings on novel commodities, technologies, and financial instruments. In place of dogmatism and idealism, what emerges is a riveting narrative of pragmatic and materialist accommodations in a period marked by the impact of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. This is revisionist history in the best sense. -- Finbarr Barry Flood, director of <i>Silsila</i>: Center for Material Histories, New York University By tracing the evolution of 'laissez-faire Salafism' in response to consumer concerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam's modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of the old question of religion and modernity by looking at the material transformations-the 'modern things'-that Muslims acquired from the industrializing West. -- Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los Angeles This nuanced, meticulously researched, yet accessible study illuminates how significant early-twentieth-century debates on Islamic law often revolved around some surprisingly ordinary objects and how local anxieties and input shaped a reformist Islam with transregional appeal. Halevi's focus on the material dimensions of modern Islamic thought adds a very welcome and promising dimension to the scholarship in this field. -- Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of <i>Islam in Pakistan: A History</i> Leor Halevi's original study offers important perspectives on turn of the twentieth-century Islamic reformist thought in the context of changing relations between law and material history. He matches up instructive readings in legal opinions delivered in Cairo by Rashid Rida with innovative background research on the new products and technologies that prompted questions to him from around the Muslim world. -- Brinkley Messick, author of <i>Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology</i>
Author Information
Leor Halevi is professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia, 2007).
