A Culture of Ambiguity

Thomas Bauer takes his audience on a delightfully opinionated and provocative journey through premodern Islamic cultural and intellectual history. His apt use of the theoretical lens of ambiguity will make readers look at both premodern and modern Islamic cultures-and beyond them at all cultural expressions-with new eyes. -- Ahmed El Shamsy, author of <i>Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition</i> Thomas Bauer's A Culture of Ambiguity belongs to the rare class of books that can change our thinking about a whole era of history-here premodern Islam. It is highly innovative and offers new ways of understanding Arabic literature, from the Qur'an via Islamic law to the Arabian Nights. -- Frank Griffel, author of <i>The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam</i> In this wonderful book, Thomas Bauer offers a truly fresh history of how Islam was lived and interpreted before the nineteenth century. With a focus on 'ambiguity,' he tells a fascinating story well beyond hackneyed cliches of 'medieval' bigots and zealots. Elegantly written, often witty, and always erudite, this is an outstandingly enjoyable must-read for anyone interested in Islam. -- Konrad Hirschler, coeditor of <i>The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents</i> Bauer's alternative history, postmodern in vision and method, debunks the modernist narrative and repudiates all its teleological claims. It shows that the modernist solution to the human problem has its own flaws as the modernist utopia has its own deficits. * Muslim World Book Review * Both the non-specialist and the seasoned scholar will come away from this book rethinking at least part of what they thought they know about Islamic culture in its past and present incarnations. * TLS *