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The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam . By Simon Cottee . London : Hurst , 2015. Pp. 243 (paper). ISBN: 9781849044691 .
Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law . By Intisar A. Rabb . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2014. Pp. 414 (cloth). ISBN: 9781107080997 .
Dissent on Core Beliefs: Religious and Secular Perspectives . Edited by Simone Chambers and Peter Nosco . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2015. Pp. 244 (cloth). ISBN: 9781107101524 .
REVIEW ESSAY
What if instead of studying religions by texts, history, and practices we studied them by what they fear? I first had this thought in considering philosophical differences between Plato's Republic and Laws.1What accounted for the shift from the profound idealism of the Republic to the apparent authoritarianism of the Laws? The standard answer is that Plato was born in a time of troubles, at the tail end of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants, who took hold of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars. As recounted in the Apology,2it was a regime that was famously and vigorously opposed by Plato's great teacher, Socrates. Socrates is absent from Plato's last dialogue, the Laws, written as an older man, after a stint in prison for having opposed another tyrant. In the Laws, the contemplation of ideal forms in Republic gives way to promulgation of detailed laws to achieve unity, harmony, and a perhaps tenuous peace. Most imperative of all is the need to avoid the chaos of war and tyranny. The philosopher is gone--Plato has lawyered up.
A similar sort of impression struck me in reading Augustine's Confessions.3Augustine began his career as a Manichaean and neo-Platonist. In his life Augustine witnessed, from the African outpost of the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity but also the decline of the Roman Empire. A fear of chaos, not unlike that of Plato, stalks the Confessions. And despite being, in the first instance, an account of Augustine's conversion to Christianity, it seemed to reflect a fear of change. Change, change, change--I wrote repeatedly in the margins. And indeed, among the many philosophical and theological debates that Augustine...