God and Logic in Islam

John Walbridge is one of the best scholars of Islamic philosophical traditions around and has already made major contributions to the field through his work on Suhrawardi and the illuminationist tradition in the Islamic East. This present book under review is an excellent example of committed scholarship with a passion for the subject and a desire to demonstrate not only that philosophical traditions have played (and need to play) a central role in the culture of the Islamic world but also that rational approaches to faith (even ones rooted in logic whose study never died out in the scholastic traditions of Islamic pedagogy) are viable and essential in the present. It is a combative plea, as the author states, aimed at an educated general reader trying to make sense of Islam in the present and for the Muslim reader to recover his heritage of rationalities. But it is the scholar of the field who is the third type of reader who will probably be most dissatisfied with the final work, aware of some interesting new avenues of thought and engagement with literature but wanting to know more and to see a more complete argument. Nevertheless, this is a work in a field which is increasingly confessional – and one that one approves heartily of. We can therefore perhaps forgive the rather excruciating title of the book – which does not quite capture anyway what one finds within even if his point about caliphate representing authority and hegemony is well taken.