| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Anouar Majid. Freedom and Othodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 270. Cloth $49.50, paper $19.95.
A variety of conceptual frameworks shape the ways that scholars, policy makers, and the general public understand global relations in the contemporary world. Some of the most influential speak in terms of the "clash of civilizations" or world-systems. Anouar Majid presents a critique of many of these analyses and provides an alternative interpretation utilizing the idea of the "social imaginary" as the framework for defining the basic analytical units of human experience.	1
Majid's basic premise is that "with the demise of Andalusian Islam in 1492, a qualitatively new world came into being" (p. 9). One significant element in the "post-Andalusian" age is the emergence of intolerant Euro-American ideology that is "almost unbendingly universal in outlook and that tolerates no alternatives in the management of human affairs" (p. x). In the past five centuries, the "crusading spirit" behind this ideology meant that other peoples of the world "would always be confronted with the traumatizing choices of conversion to the West's current universalist principles or exclusion, and even defeat" (p. 104). The basic conflicts of the modern age arise out of the struggle between universalisms attempting to impose a global uniformity and the distinctive identities of diverse cultures in a pluralist world. In Majid's view, the "best antidote to all universalisms, particularly the ones that have marked world history in the post-Andalusian age, is a world of strong cultures and religions" (p. 193).	. . .

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