Varieties Of Muslim Experience: Encounters With Arab Political And Cultural Life

Description

In Varieties of Muslim Experience, anthropologist Lawrence Rosen explores aspects of Arab Muslim life that are, at first glance, perplexing to Westerners. He ranges over such diverse topics as why Arabs eschew portraiture, why a Muslim scientist might be attracted to fundamentalism, and why the Prophet must be protected from blasphemous cartoons. What connects these seemingly disparate features of Arab social, political, and cultural life? Rosen argues that the common thread is the importance Arabs place on the negotiation of interpersonal relationships—a link that helps to explain actions as seemingly unfathomable as suicide bombing and as elusive as Quranic interpretation. Written with eloquence and a deep knowledge of the entire spectrum of Muslim experience, Rosen’s book will interest not only anthropologists and Islamicists but anyone invested in better understanding the Arab world.

About the Author

Lawrence Rosen is the Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is both an anthropologist and a lawyer. His main interests are in the relation between cultural concepts and their implementation in social and legal relationshipsHe is the author of The Culture of Islam; Varieties of Muslim Experience; Bargaining For Reality; and Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew; all also published by the University of Chicago Press.He teaches courses on law and anthropology, comparative religious systems, the American Indian and the law, and the theory of cultural systems.He received the Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997 and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 1997-98.