Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Abstract

in the last chapter, Turner's attempt to contextualize heresy trials is welcome, but the result is a mixed bag, again because of errors and confusions. For example, he argues that al-Mutawakkil's actions, '[c]ontrary to the usual understanding', do not define him as a Eanbal; (p. 135). But the real reason that the caliph cannot have been a Eanbal; is that, in the mid-third/ninth century, no one could be a Eanbal; (as Turner himself knows, since he quotes Christopher Melchert to that effect some seven pages later). In his conclusion, Turner asserts that, after al-Mutawakkil, no single group of sectarians could gain 'a decisive advantage. .. in determining normativity' (p. 149). But why assume that sectarians want everyone to agree with them? Declaring others out of bounds need not be about 'determining normativity'; it is just as likely to be about ensuring the purity of one's little group of faithful. In the early Islamic case, many sectarians both before and after al-Mutawakkil seem to have been content to follow their own truth and thereby ensure their own salvation. Whether others followed them or not was in most cases a matter of indifference. Of course Turner is right when he notes that caliphs were a special case: in theory at least, they were responsible for the salvation of the whole umma. But no doctrine of the imamate requires the imam to persuade others to join him. Rather, imami creeds make believers responsible for identifying and following the imam. This, pace Turner, is how the early caliphs seem to have understood their role. This book is valuable for its attempt to fit caliphal interventions into a broader political narrative. The point that AAmad ibn Eanbal's trial was not a wild divergence from the norm is well taken, and serves as a welcome corrective to arguments made by other scholars, including me. Here I should add that Turner has kind things to say about my work, for which I am grateful. But the book suffers from too many problems of definition to provide the revisionist history it promises. Under the influence of Protestant notions of religiosity, scholarship has long prioritized the inner experience and spirituality of the convert in studies of religious change. More recently, academics have historicized the very notion of conversion and put a greater emphasis on social and political dimensions as well 338 book reviews