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Carlo Caldarola, ed., Religions and Societies: Asia and the Middle East, Religion and Society vol. 22 (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1982). Pp. 696.

The most interesting article, in intricacy and cleverness of argumentation, breaking of new ground, and fertility of concepts, is paradoxically the most technical: "Fatimid Historiography: A Case Study—The Quarrel with the Zirids, 1048-58." Its author, M. Brett, undermines the conventionally accepted explanation for the Hilalian invasion— that the Fatimids "unleashed" the Arabs to punish the Zirids for their insubordination. By making a few imaginative, albeit arguable, corrections to previous readings and interpretations of key texts, he argues that this widely accepted understanding was developed only as a post hoc explanation for Arab incursions and victories that took place for other reasons. In the course of his demonstration, he shows with considerable subtlety how various types of authors handled the events in question according to their own purposes, tastes, and sensibilities. Despite his maintaining an interest in what "really" happened, Brett is able to learn something about Fatimid cultural and political history even from sources that, according to him, are inaccurate. In so doing, he raises stimulating issues for other historians as well. Other articles tend to be more descriptive than analytic, more about historians than historiography. Where historiographical issues are raised, they are limited to the topic at hand and are basic to a traditional approach—how to overcome the limitations (in terms of modern expectations) of the evidence, e.g., typology in biographical literature, or test its reliability; how to get at an author's biases and methods of composition; how to distinguish real history from propaganda. Governing the whole is a fairly common positivistic agenda—filter out all the bias and propaganda to recover the separable kernel of fact. Although most of the articles deal with formal narrative compositions, none is informed by the insights of narratology, nor is any concerned with stylistic or semiotic analysis of texts. The authors could profitably substitute, for such polarities as propaganda-history, an understanding that all narrative composition is governed by rules which help the writer turn experience into event, and that the "facts" presented always have to be understood in that light. Using the words of one well-known semiotician, historical accounts, like other stories, can often be considered present fictions about absent realities. (1 refer to Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation [New Haven, 1982], Chapter 2. Although Scholes does not mention historical narrative specifically, he includes stories about things that "really" happened in his discussion of fictiveness and literariness.) It would also have helped these authors to acknowledge a very common medieval understanding of the relationship of truth and fact—that the latter does not guarantee the former, but only provides the raw material for its elucidation. (See Hayden White, "The Fiction of Factual Representation," in Angus Fletcher, ed., The Literature of Fact, New York, 1976, pp. 22-44). Finally, they might have shown more of an interest in what we can learn about the intellectual outlook of an age from the very bias that good modern historians like to filter out. We will be able to make the most of our sources only when we learn to make appropriate use of everything they contain.