The Word in Arabic

been reframed to address more cogently a connected series of important issues, including the impact that an era of economic austerity, and concerns over canonical purity had in catalysing the Mutʿazilite inquisition, which in turn, atrophied secular pluralism in ʿAbbāsid culture. The book contains too many spelling errors (most notably on pp. 1, 81, 137, and 271) and displays an inappropriate – to this reviewer at any rate – image on the jacket cover of a painting by Pierre-Louis Bouchard, the nineteenth-century Paris-based Orientalist artist. The said image depicts a man with a turban reclining on a divan while being entertained by cavorting female slaves. Did Caswell’s serious and largely effective effort at critical scholarship merit such a cover, I wonder?