Comparing articles in successive editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam shows evolution of Western scholarship on the Islamic world
From the publisher’s introduction to ”EI Three Preview,” a booklet that arrived in my mail today:
“In the spring of 2007 the first instalment of EI3 will appear, exactly 100 years after the first printed articles of EI1 were presented to the international scholarly community. … The question of why EI3 starts so soon after the English version of the Second Edition was finished, is relevant here. The answer lies not in the moment EI2 was completed, but when it began. This happened in the mid-1950s, the first volume appearing in 1960. Since that time Western scholarship concerning the Islamic world has changed considerably. The social sciences have entered the field and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has sparked a fierce scholarly debate about Western (re)presentations of Islam and Muslim societies–to mention only two factors.”
The booklet consists of the articles for “Alf laila wa-laila”/”Arabian Nights” from each successive edition and it’s quite instructive to compare them side-by-side in this way. For example, J. Oestrup’s 1913 article in EI1 includes sentences like:
“Like all Orientals the Arabs from the earliest times enjoyed imaginative stories. But the intellectual horizon of the true Arabs being rather narrow, the material for these entertainments was borrowed mainly from elsewhere. … ”
In the EI2, E. Littmann’s 1960 article on the same subject included this unfortunate “observation” and much of the rest of Oestrup’s original article, while adding a discussion of the various genres of the stories.
The new article for the EI3 has been completely rewritten by U. Marzolph, the leading scholar of today on the subject, and offers a balanced survey of all the important aspects of the Arabian Nights.
Why not try this: select articles on the same subject from all three editions plus the Supplement, and compare their treatment and coverage of that subject over time?
