Page:The Moslem World Vol XI.djvu/111

 . By Traugott Mann. pp. 150. Gilt top, profusely illustrated, 5 colored maps. Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing. Bielefeld und Leipzig, 1914. Price, 5 marks.

Published on the eve of the War, "Islam Past and Present" is among the last offerings of the scholarship of Germany before she put down the pen of the savant to wield the sword of the Turk. To students of the Islamic world the book is a gift which need provoke no "Timeo Danaos." It is the latest issue of the well-known series of elegant historical treatises, Monographien zur JVeltgeschichte, appearing in Leipzig under the editorship of Professor Eduard Heyck, in collaboration with a corps of German specialists. It is uniform and closely related with the editor's own vivid chronicle of Palestine and the Crusades, {Die Kreuzzilge und das Heilige Land.) The author. Dr. Traugott Mann, has produced a work at once learned and lucid, fresh and fascinating, brief and brilliant—a marvel of condensation. He has done in succinct manner for the average German reader today, what August Miiller did for the critical student of Islam thirty-five years ago in his comprehensive survey of Moslem expansion, Der Islam im Morgenund Abendland. Indeed, the present monograph may be suggestively described as an emended miniature of Miiller's ample, still classical, though at some points superseded, volumes. Yet, severely compacted as it is. Dr. Mann's production is no mere compendium or secondhand epitome. It is a series of clear-cut cameos, aglow with original verve.

There are five chapters dealing successively with Pre-Islamic Arabia, Mohammed, The Koran, Religious and Political Development, Islam in Modern Times. The range and sequence of subjects is strikingly similar to that of the Dutch Professor Hurgronje's American Lectures} but the treatment is somewhat less popular, and is richer in historical detail. Less discursive as to topics than Professor Margoliouth's excellent little handbook,' so widely circulated in England and America, the German work has a clearer perspective and a statelier stride.

Dr. Mann has striven, for the most part successfully, to write as an impartial historian. On points of scholarly debate his judgments partake of the middle way between extreme deductions. For example, on the question of pre-Mohammedan Arabian culture, he will not concede to the archaeologists that the rise of Islam was simply a phase of the final "up-flaring" {Aufflackern) of a high preceding civilization threatened with extinction. Neither will he approve the picture of the Wektel-Jahiliya, or "Time of Barbarism'" in pagan Arabia so blackly painted by Moslem writers, who would exalt Mohammed into "the prodigious author of a new creation out of pre-existent nothing"—(^der iibergewaltige Schopfer eines Neuen aus dem vorherigen Nichts.) (p. 3) The Founder of Islam, our author opines, inherited not only survivals of indigenous cultures which flourished in various strains in certain sections of the Peninsula (whose religious and political development 1 Mohammedanism: Its Origin, Religious and Political Growth, and Present State. By C. Snouck Hurgronje. Putnam's. ' Mohammedanism. By D. S. Margoliouth. Williams and Norgate. (Home University Library).
 * Cf. Goldziher: Muhammedanische Studien, Vol. I, p. 220 et. seq.