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Reviews: The Near and Middle East
It is a clear sign of the many fallacies of academia that in the early twenty-first century a group of renowned scholars from Japan, Italy, Spain, Israel, Turkey, England, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and the USA have still to argue for the necessity of finally establishing the study of the kinsfolk of the Prophet Muhammad - which the editor of the volume neatly calls sayyido-sharifology - not even as a key field of research within Islamic studies but simply as "an 'additional line' or a 'tangential line' of inquiry worthy of serious consideration", to use the words of the editor in his preamble to the volume, the essay "Toward the formation of Sayyido-Sharifology: questioning accepted fact" (The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies, No. 22, 2004, 87-103). The terminology used for identifying the object of enquiry already, however, poses some problems. The editor proposes the designation "sayyid/sharifs", to suggest that the volume examines the entire phenomenon of the Prophet's kinsfolk, in search of a common framework for enquiry that goes beyond the local varieties represented by the various honorific titles used for it (such as habibs, salips, and mirs).
The volume originates from an international conference on "The role and position of Sayyid/Sharifs in Muslim societies" convened at the University of Tokyo on 22-23 September 2009 by Kazuo Morimoto. The conference and the volume are a continuation...