| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Muhammad Qasim Zaman. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 293. $29.95.
Deciding how to translate key religious concepts that span the boundaries of civilizations often presents exceptional difficulties. It is hardly surprising, therefore, when attendant problems are deferred rather than resolved by adopting the indigenous lexeme as a foreign loan word. The term ulama is a particularly engaging instance of such a semantic Trojan horse because, while it refers broadly to a timeless category of learned Muslims, literally "scholars," it also conveys a diffuse, indeed, contradictory array of potent ideological claims and counterclaims concerning authority that continue to defy uniform definition.	1
Many leading historians in the West have not hesitated to liken Islam's ulama to Christian clergy, but this comparison was seldom welcomed and often refuted by Muslim counterparts preferring to emphasize differences rather than similarities. Furthermore, as various parts of the Islamic world underwent the dramatic changes that define modern times, bringing substantial social upheaval and cultural disorientation, the ulama were often seen and treated by those in power as reactionary remnants of a passing age. There were degrees of such marginalization, and some exceptions, especially in the Arabian peninsula, but overall, the birth of independent nation-states in the Middle East brought with it a mindset that confronted the ulama with "reforms" that progressively deprived them of their institutional autonomy and pressed them to submit to demeaning political and economic realities.	. . .

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