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Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London and New York: Verso, 1993). Pp. 157.

Islam in the body of Muslims. A parallel distinction, Arkoun suggests, exists between the "Celestial Book" and the historical "book" which appears in the mushaf—that is, the Qur'an. "Revelation" occurs, according to Arkoun, "each time that a new vocabulary comes to radically change man's view of his condition, his being-in-the-world, his participation in the production of meaning" (p. 34). The same distinctions must be made with regard to the crucial issue of "authority" and "power." The separation of church and state was produced by history and the political order, along with and alongside the degeneration of religious symbolism into legal codes (p. 21). Contemporary ventures into secularism and nationalism are examples of the outcome (combined with a variety of other historical causes, of course). Religious discourse is thoroughly metaphorical and the failure to arrive at a commonly agreed-upon theory of metaphor has resulted in linguistic problems manifesting themselves as theological disputes. Understanding this point is the only way to see Islam within the context of the Near Eastern religious milieu. The religious spirit that motivated the Bible and the Qur'an has, through the process of theological formulation, manifested itself as the closed and official corpus which characterizes the respective scriptures of each of the religious traditions. These are thoughts which Arkoun has expounded upon on a number of occasions, most notably in his "The Notion of Revelation: From Ahl al-Kitab to the Societies of the Book," published in Die Welt des Islam, 28 (1988) and reprinted in Arkoun, Lectures du Coran, 2nd ed. (Tunis, 1991). The discussion continues throughout the book, highlighting all the "standard" topics of Islamic studies as well as those which make the newspaper headlines. What differentiates Arkoun's work from all other "introductions" to Islam, and what remains crucial to his entire enterprise, is that he makes a problem of every issue: It simply is not possible to talk of Muhammad, hadith, women, dogma, the Greek heritage, and Sufism (to pick but a few of the topics raised in other questions) without recognizing the problems both in the way in which questions are framed and in the ways in which generalizations applicable to "Islam" simply are not adequate to today's intellectual needs. Direct answers do not necessarily arise to any of these questions in the book; the goal is more one of refraining and confronting the issues. Arkoun reminds us many times in the course of his discussion that this book is too short to allow for a full elaboration of the topic at hand. Many of the footnotes point to other of his works for a fuller discussion (and the book contains a useful bibliography of all of Arkoun's writings). But part of Arkoun's agenda also is to point out the work which still needs to be done in moving the study of Islam forward into the arena of contemporary thinking and scholarship. For example, he calls for "an exhaustive history of philosophy and of the religions of the Book" on several occasions, a project which awaits tackling, and one which suggests a lifetime project for a team of scholars, at the very least. But this, according to Arkoun, is what is necessary. Robert Lee has performed a valuable service to the English-speaking world through his painstaking efforts at translating this book. It will make the work of Mohammed Arkoun accessible to many more people, and much will be gained from that. The book may well inspire a new generation of scholars to explore new ways of thinking about Islam, a revolution which is long overdue.