The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Islam

Although there is no dearth of Reference Works on Islam, most of these works are by Orientalists and fail to fulfil even the basic prerequisite of scholarship – of stating faithfully what Islam is or what Muslims profess and practise. On the contrary, in the name scholarship these works distort the Islamic reality. As a result, these works, which should serve as academic tools, obstruct and prevent readers from obtaining a fair, objective picture of Islamic subjects or topics and Muslim beliefs and practices. A glaring and fairly recent instance illustrative of this is the much–vaunted five volume Encyclopedia of the Qur’an edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe, brought out by the prestigious Western publishing house, Brill of the Netherlands (2001-2006), which contains contributions by scores of Western scholars. In his excellent, threadbare critique of this epitome of Western scholarship, Muzaffar Iqbal arrives at this perceptive conclusion: “… it has been built on the characteristic biases, claims and prejudices of the Orientalists … It is a non-representative, discourteous, and blasphemous hodgepodge of disparate material”. (See his Review Article, “Western Academia and the Qur’an: Some Enduring Prejudices”, Muslim World Book Review 30:1; Autumn 2009, pp. 6-18). The same publisher’s other seemingly magisterial Encyclopedia of Islam is vitiated by almost identical errors of perspective in that despite being highly informative, it presents only a garbled version of the Islamic articles of faith, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s exemplary life and career. The same holds true for the majority of reference works on the Qur’an, be it W.M. Watt’s Companion to the Qur’an, John Penrice’s A Dictionary and Glossary of the Koran or Arther Jeffery’s Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an (For a detailed discussion on these see Abdur Raheem Kidwai’s “Reference works on the Quran in English: A Survey”, in the Journal of Quranic Research and Studies, Madina, Saudi Arabia, 1:2, 2006, 5-25).