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Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar

ring to writings in other languages, Penn is inclined to exaggerate their tendencies to misrepresent Islam, so as to create a contrast between these and the images created by Syriac writers. This is problematic. First, a fair and systematic comparison of the writings about Islam of the various Eastern Christian communities should precede such a claim. Second, the author’s claim that ‘Syriac writings were more restrained than Greek and Latin texts in how they caricatured Islam’ (55) is probably true grosso modo, but the types of caricatures he lists are to be found in Syriac sources too. Just as in Greek and Latin sources, we can read in Syriac that Muhammad’s corpse was rotting after his failed resurrection; why the Qur’an is a laughable mishmash; and how Muslims worship Aphrodite like their pagan ancestors without even realizing it. It is just that Penn does not cite the Syriac writings in question. In other words, it seems as though some texts have been conveniently ignored. The irony is that, although Penn makes frequent comments in the book to underline this supposed contrast in image-making between Syriac Christians and other Christians, in his conclusion he takes much of this claim away, because when he makes up the balance, he admits that the Syriac writings reviewed are very diverse in their approach to Islam and reflect a range of different experiences. Moreover, he is no longer sure that it is useful to think of the portrayal of Islam in terms of ‘(in)tolerance’, not only because this is a modern concept, but also because the texts he studied are, in all fairness, mostly about the self and not about the other: ‘these writers’ emphasis always remained on Christian self-identity’ (185). More convincing is the contrast that Penn paints between, one the one hand, the close interaction between Syriac Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, and on the other, the distance between the Western world and Islam, as it is perceived in the West, and intensified by writings such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996). Penn’s irritation about such a black-and-white world view in the United States was one of the motivating factors behind this book project. Hopefully readers will find this work engaging and agree with Penn’s conclusion (186) that ‘for centuries Christianity and Islam exhibited too much permeability, interdependence, and convergence to be defined as firmly bound, independent entities’.