Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilisation and Religion

When publishers and editors look for reasons to compile and publish new reference works on major world religions, they usually appeal to the need for specialists to know about developing knowledge, on the one hand, and for generalists and the common reader to get a clear picture of the topic. These reasons can be found in the introductions to such reference works and, as well as being entirely reasonable (though not always does it follow through in the eating of the pudding), these claims are also true. And this is certainly true here. It is all too easy to get...