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A Culture of Ambiguity - An Alternative History of Islam (Paperback)
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A Culture of Ambiguity - An Alternative History of Islam (Paperback)
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In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by
dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such
stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam's medieval
"Golden Age," marked by rationality, tolerance, and even
proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture,
and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and
intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern
Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span
of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that
aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute,
uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for
ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges
across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern
Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to
literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and
foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between
religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture,
which stands in striking contrast to both present-day
fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how
Islam's encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty
helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies
that in their own ways rejected ambiguity-and therefore also their
own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A
Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic
history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for
investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
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