This book about books highlights the growing – and to many the hidden – range of reference works dealing with Muslim civilisation. For many readers in English‐speaking contexts, works like those edited by John Esposito (such as The Islamic World: Past and Present (Esposito et al., 2004) and the earlier Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (Esposito, 1995) may already be familiar. There are many more, often multi‐volume projects, that extend back over many years, with more increasingly available online. Yet knowing this can disguise just how much there is, above all in Arabic and Turkish. By that token, this work is divided into three equal parts (after a brief introduction): the first in English (pages 11‐182, the default lingua franca), the second in Turkish (pages 183‐366), and the third in Arabic (pages 367‐512). Understandably, the final part can be read “from the back” in the normal way. Each part is a mirror of the other.
This first publication in the Muslim Civilization Abstracts (MCA) project (which started in 2003, arising out of a conference on encyclopedias at the Institute, held a year earlier) shows the bibliographical character of the project. Its aim is “to facilitate access to scholarly resources on Muslim civilizations”. Wider, the aim of the project, and the Institute, is to promote and enable interaction and dialogue between scholars engaged with matters Muslim around the world. It refers to itself as a platform for Muslim scholars, not in an ideological sense, but in order to promote better understanding and research. The MCA plans to develop further work under three main themes – knowledge, social and cultural change, and society and modernities. The work under review is in three parts (English, Turkish, and Arabic), and the Institute website states that plans are in place to develop the work of investigating and abstracting works in other languages (such as Urdu and Russian and Malay). These have already been explored here and, where appropriate, translated into the three chosen languages.
As a bibliographical and critical guide to encyclopedias about Muslim civilisation, what we find here is not only a work that flags some of the key “mainstream” works regularly used in the field, but one that also (intentionally) emphasises sources (some available in English, some not) emanating from and dealing with Muslim civilisation in specific contexts, above all Turkish (and Ottoman for historical information). Understandably, some of these are published in Turkey in Turkish. Representing this strand in the work are reference sources like the Encyclopedia of Islam from the Turkish Religious Foundation in Istanbul, published between 1988 and 2005 in 30 volumes. It is described as a work in progress, offers an interesting critique of earlier work (that allegedly reflected European “orientalism”), and seeks to realign our knowledge of the complexity and contribution of Muslim thought. Others include an encyclopedia of the Turkish family, another on writers in the Turkic world, and two on Turkish literature and language. Pages 162‐72 and 180‐2 are devoted to such works, showing how part of the aim of this project is to open up to world scholarship important works that have remained unknown except to specialists and specialist language‐speakers.
In the same way, works in languages other than Turkish are represented in the guide, in abstracts translated in turn into English, Turkish and Arabic. Examples are a Bengali version of an encyclopedia of Islam published in Dhaka in the 1980s, a Tatar encyclopedic dictionary translated in 2002 from a Russian original in 1999 (and published in Kazan), an Urdu encyclopedia from New Delhi that includes Islam, and a Japanese work on the modern Islamic world compiled by Hiroshi Kagaya and published in Japanese in 2002. Extending outwards from this, numerous dictionary entries can be found too, from the Medyan Larousse dictionary widely used in Turkey to more specialised works like one published in the new Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet, and the magisterial encyclopedia of Persian (1947‐63) from the Dihkhuda Institute at the University of Tehran. In addition to general works on Muslim civilisation and Islam, there are entries too on the Qu'ran, on Sufism, and on Shi'ism. Geographical focus takes many forms – works from and on places like Iran and Indonesia, Palestine and Egypt, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Thematic works too on specialities like art and literature, law and women's studies, politics and philosophy and theatre.
Aptin Khanbaghi has coordinated the work of a large number of international contributors and translators (some contributors needed translating). He is a senior researcher and project team leader for the Muslim Civilizations Abstracts project, and author of a book on minority religions in early Iran with the title The Fire, the Star and the Cross, published in 2006. It should be said, for context, that the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations is based on the campus of the UK Aga Khan University. The Aga Khan Foundation (headquarters in Geneva) is one of the largest international non‐governmental organisations, with outreach in over 16 countries. Its focal interests include health, education and the civil society. The university was founded by the Aga Khan (charter in 1983) and, while based in Pakistan, also operates in London, where the Institute itself is based. The Institute carries out research, runs courses (such as a Master's in Muslim Studies), and runs projects and publication programmes like the abstracts project.
The abstracts themselves, as well as being presented in three languages (drawing on far more), are often descriptive. Typically, on an encyclopedia of the Muslim world published in Jakarta in Indonesia: it covers modern issues, counters stereotypes of Indonesia, is part of a long project, is arranged by theme across the seven volumes, and so forth. More prosaic, a further abstract on the encyclopedic reference book on the Republic of Kazakhstan, section‐by‐section, with illustrations but no index. On the other hand, other abstracts are richer and open up critical perspectives: such as comments on The Turkish Encyclopaedia (published in Ankara between 1943 and 1984) which is much in need of updating, even though it helps non‐Turkish readers with Latin transliterations; or comments on an encyclopedia on human rights in Islam published in Cairo for Egyptian readers, where the abstractor believes the work falls short of discussing the issues fully. Abstracts may also criticise matters like copy‐editing, the absence of bibliographies and gaps in coverage (e.g. one work appears to have lumped Baha'ism under Islam and another falls short on cross‐references). Universal is the hope that more might be updated and converted to digital formats. Some admit to being tangential to mainstream Muslim/Islamic concerns.
Given the approach and content in this work, it is unlikely to interest anyone other than a specialist research library or institution, or scholarly research in the field. Although there are a few references to library collections (something Borges might have regarded as simulacra, or even palimpsests, of bibliographies!), and although it is likely that some collection managers will use the work as a checklist for stock, that is not its main role – that is to identify some of the rich variety of reference material on Muslim civilisations that has been bypassed or ignored by mainstream scholarship, and, beyond that, by revealing just how many people are working (and have worked) in the field and how any specialist can (and should) widen his or her frame of reference. Dialogue may well come from such knowledge, above all since Islam has taken root in so many diverse cultures around the world and its scholarship has developed in idiosyncratic but mutually enriching ways.
