This volume of 13 essays edited by Olivier Carré covers, from west to east, these regions: the Maghrib, Senegal and Niger, Southeast Europe, two on Turkey, Egypt and Syria, Lebanon, Iran, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, India, China, and Southeast Asia. Salim Nasr provides an excellent review of confessional arrangements in Lebanon, Jean-François Bayart reviews the abundant recent literature on the Alevis of Turkey, and Alexander Popovic condenses his scattered writings on the Muslims of the Balkans. Jean-Louis Triaud's discussion of Islam in Niger is the most comprehensive on this subject anywhere.
While these and other chapters are useful in themselves, one wonders why they have been collected in book form. They lack cohesion and the scope of their coverage appears random. Why cover Niger and ignore Nigeria? Why two articles on Turkey and no mention of Libya or Saudi Arabia? Why Pakistan and India but not Bangladesh?
More fundamentally, the premise of this collection seems to be that one can comprehend the Islamic revival as a whole by studying its constituent elements. But the larger pattern is more than the sum of its parts. Just as one does not try to understand the recent world-wide surge in inflation or terrorism by assembling case studies in individual countries, so with the Islamic revival. However useful some of the chapters in this collection, the book as a whole offers few insights into the general question raised in the title, that of relations between Islam and the state in recent times.
Daniel Pipes, the author of Slave Soldiers and Islam, is a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow at the Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State.
