Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 384 pages
- Published by: Oxford University Press, USA October 21, 2004
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0195125592
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195125597
-
Book Dimensions:
7.5 x 5 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 9.6 ounces
From Booklist
In this volume "designed for general readers with little or no knowledge of Islam," more than 2,000 alphabetically arranged entries treat "the religion of Islam and its impact on history, politics, and society." Editor Esposito also edited the four-volume
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), from which the new work extracts and updates material. Recent developments are reflected in the entries
Bin Laden, Osama; HAMAS; Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO);
Qaeda, al-; and
Taliban. There are also entries that describe Islam in various countries and regions, while the religious foundation of Islam is treated in the entries
Pillars of Islam and
Quran. The Islamic perspective on topics such as abortion and homosexuality is also provided. Although the focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the inclusion of important persons and places in the history of Islam broadens the scope of the work.
The goal of creating a compact resource for the general reader may account for the lack of features such as supplemental bibliographies and an index. Cross-referencing isi nsufficient. The entry for
Pillars of Islam has no
see reference from "Five Pillars," a name by which they are also commonly known. Further, this entry fails to point the reader to the entries for each of the individual pillars, something an index and
see also references could easily accomplish.
The standard reference tool for Islam is the ongoing
Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill, 1954-). Densely academic, it is beyond the scope of many libraries and contains little in the way of contemporary issues. Another option is the single-volume
The New Encyclopedia of Islam (AltaMira, 2001), which includes suggestions for further reading, illustrations, and better cross-references, though it, too, lacks an index and bibliographies for entries.
World events have sparked a keen interest in Islam. Despite its drawbacks,
The Oxford Dictionary of Islam would be a useful addition to public and academic libraries.
RBBCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Review
"This book would be a wonderful addition to a church library or a good supplement to a textbook list for a freshman- or sophomore-level university couse on the fascinating world of Islam."--Restoration Quarterly
"News coverage of the Arab world has expanded and improved in the last two years. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam may be your best bet short of reading a pile of books, or living next door to a professor of Islamic studies. John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, has assembled an impressive team of contributors who have produced a concise, accessible reference volume. With more than 2,000 entries, it covers almost anything you might want to look up, and some crucially important things you might not think to."--The
New York Times, Education Life
Reader ReviewsI bought this dictionary hoping that it would be a useful reference for a graduate course dealing with the relationship between Christianity and Islam during the early years of Islam. I have found it to be spotty and inconsistent. For example, I wanted to know the dates of the Abbasid dynasty. I tried looking up "Abbasid." There is no such entry. I tried looking at the timeline at the end of the dictionary. There, the first reference to Abbasids is in the entry for 744-750 (p. 352): "Third Muslim civil war and defeat of Umayyads by Abbasids." There is no statement that this marks the beginning of the Abbasid Dynasty. However, the entry for the year 661 (p. 351) does include the information that "Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan founds Umayyad Dynasty." Why is there no comparable statement about the founding of the Abbasid Dynasty? I decided to see if the dictionary had an entry for the Umayyads. Yes, it does (p. 326). This makes all the harder to understand why there is no entry for the Abbasids. Returning to the timeline, the second entry that mentions the Abbasids (750-850) mentions three caliphs of this dynasty: al-Mahdi, Harun al-Rashid and al-Mamun. Does the body of the dictionary have entries for each of these men? No, yes (alphabetized under "Harun"), yes (alphabetized under "Mamun"). I tried looking for al-Mahdi under "al-" and "Mahdi." There are a few entries beginning with "al-," but not nearly as many as would be required were all of them listed consistently. I looked under "Mahdi." There I found an entry for Mahdi as an honorific applied to Muhammad and the first four caliphs; one for Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi (d. 1959); one for Sadiq al-Mahdi (b. 1936); and one for Mahdists which just has a cross-reference to the following entry, Mahdiyyah, which turns out to be a messianic movement founded in Sudan in the late 19th century. Obviously none of these was relevant to my search to the al-Mahdi mentioned in the timeline. I finally resorted to Wikipedia, where I learned that the full name of this caliph was Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi. I tried looking under "Muhammad" and "ibn Mansur" in the dictionary, but with no result. I noticed that the name of one of the Prophet's wives is given as "Aisha" in the timeline (p. 351, years 656-661). When I looked her name up in the body of the dictionary, I found it spelled "Aishah" (p. 12). Moving beyond people to things, I found an entry for "chador," the Persian term for the full-length veil worn for modesty by conservative Muslim women, but the Arabic term "abaya" is missing. There is an entry for "hijab" and it is defined as if it were an abaya. However, hijab is actually used as a more general term referring to various kinds of clothing and behavior intended to preserve the modesty of both women and men, not just the full-length veil. In conclusion, this dictionary does have a large number of terms useful for understand Islamic culture and history. However, it lacks many terms that it should have and it shows editorial inconsistency. At the least, a reader will have to supplement this book with others.
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