A Landmark Event

By Noel Malcom, *The New Cambridge History of Islam Ed by Michael Cook et al: review* - The Telegraph - London, UK; Sunday, February 6, 2011

The New Cambridge History of Islam is a work of breathtaking scholarship that does justice to one of the world's great religions, says Noel Malcolm

For the British media, a major scholarly event is like the proverbial small earthquake in Chile: “not many dead”, which means that it is hardly newsworthy at all. The publication of The New Cambridge History of Islam is, despite the potentially inflammatory subject matter, unlikely to lead to any deaths, or even death threats; this is a work of scholarship, not polemics. Yet for those interested in the Islamic world, the appearance of this multi-volume work really is a landmark event, deserving all the public attention and acclamation it can get.

The original Cambridge History of Islam came out in 1970, in two fat volumes. One of them covered the “Central Islamic Lands” (mainly the Middle East) from the origins of Islam to the present; the other dealt with the West, Africa, and the other parts of Asia. The contributors were leading experts, but their chapters were mostly rather simplified narratives, aimed at the general reader and almost footnote-free. And the version of history that was being simplified was in some cases a standard view already long established in the textbooks.

What a lot can change in four decades! For a start, the NCHI is three times the size of the old one, with six volumes of roughly 800 pages each. Footnotes abound, and so do lengthy reading lists; the contributions are plugged into ongoing academic debates, in a way that the chapters in the old Cambridge History did not seem to be. But while it’s true that an ordinary individual reader will find the price tag of the NCHI prohibitive, this is not a work for academic libraries alone. Every good public library should have it.

The huge difference in length between this work and its predecessor is only partly explained, though, by the fact that it is intended for academics as well as general readers. The main reason is that the last two generations have witnessed an extraordinary expansion of knowledge in the field of Islamic studies. Areas such as Central Asian history, or topics such as the spread of Islam in West Africa, or the peculiarities of Indonesian Islam, have been the targets of barrages of monographs; the NCHI is a first attempt to map out a whole new landscape of knowledge.

If those topics sound somehow peripheral, there has also been original work on some of the central features of Islamic faith and practice. Look up “Sufis” in the indexes of the old Cambridge History, and you will find a few scattered references here and there. That reflected the standard view, in which Islam was “official Islam”, a religion celebrated in mosques, and run by imams and muftis; Sufism was some sort of exotic appendage, a minor optional extra for the mystically inclined.

In the NCHI, on the other hand, one finds a lengthy chapter on the early development of Sufism, another one on Sufism and “Neo-Sufism” in the modern age, and multiple references to the Sufi orders or brotherhoods throughout the work. These orders, with their revered leaders, their traditions of personal instruction and their own special forms of worship, have been a major part of the fabric of religious life in most Muslim societies, accepted and valued by almost everyone (except the intolerant Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia). Yet only recently have outside scholars begun to appreciate the role they have played.

But while modern scholarly work has added hugely to our knowledge of Islam, it has performed what might be called subtractions as well as additions. Until the 1970s, almost every account of the origins of Islam accepted the basic story told by the Muslims themselves – a story derived from the Koran, the hadiths (canonical traditions about Mohammed and his teachings) and the writings of medieval Islamic chroniclers and biographers. In the late 1970s, however, a number of Western experts (including Michael Cook, who is the general editor of the NCHI) challenged the consensus, arguing that there was virtually no reliable textual evidence from the earliest period: the text of the Koran had crystallised quite slowly, the hadiths were expressions of later views, and the chroniclers had themselves lacked authentic materials for their histories.

This is a battlefield from which the smoke has not yet cleared. The account of early Islam in the first volume of the NCHI is a cautious, proviso-laden version of the traditional story; near the end of that volume, a special chapter (no less cautious) is devoted to the modern debates; and elsewhere in the work, individual writers take a variety of positions. Some good points are made in favour of trusting elements of the traditional version; but, as Professor Chase Robinson observes, “the authenticity of nearly all documents from the early period is impossible to verify”.

No doubt this Cambridge History too will be replaced, one day, by a bigger and better one. The fascinating chapters it offers on thematic and cultural subjects (such as women and sexuality, “the city and the nomad”, or religious conversion) make one long for more of the same: why no chapter on slavery in Islam, for example, or on the history of the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca)? And perhaps a new edition might find a little more to say about the indigenous Muslims of Europe; Bosnia gets just a couple of pages here, roughly the same amount as the history of Muslim immigrants in Canada.

But these are small cavils. I have spent nearly a month reading these volumes, and have learned a huge amount – not least, from the final volume, about the background to the various forms of present-day “political Islam”. And I finish reading them impressed by two things: the way in which Islam itself has held together as a religion, stretched across multiple states and cultures with no Pope or hierarchical Church to maintain it; and the way in which this team of scholars has condensed so much learning, with such clarity, into a mere 4,929 pages.

The New Cambridge History of Islam
Ed by Michael Cook et al
CAMBRIDGE, £650, six vols, 4,929pp
Available from Telegraph Books + 44(0)844 871 1516