Book, Classical Islam, The: Itineraries of a Culture[LS]

If we consider the importance of overcoming the cultural gap that, in Brazil, has marked our ignorance about the Arab world, this book is a decisive milestone in breaking the silence and allowing us to hear the voices of Islamic culture. Of its multiple aspects, we highlight three that seem to be the most relevant in this beautiful book. Thanks to its interdisciplinary structure and the comparative organization of the essays, it makes manifest the particularity of Arabic language and literature, history and law, practices and thought, and, simultaneously, reveals its universality, responsible for its complete role in the formation of Jewish and Christian thought and, therefore, in the constitution of Western culture. In doing so, it highlights the second aspect, namely, its political significance, as our lack of knowledge of the way of being and living, of saying and thinking specific to Islamic culture makes us easy prey to the interests of an ideology that turns Arabs into fanatics. religious, terrorists enemies of peace and freedom. We allow ourselves to be persuaded by the image of the barbarian, a malevolent representation of the Other as the one who endangers our identity and against whom we must defend ourselves. The essays published here vigorously dismantle this prejudiced image and lead us both to understanding the meaning of cultural difference and to the perception of the proximity between East and West at the time of the establishment of Western culture, inviting us to embrace the difference and recognize it in distant the next. Finally, this book unequivocally attests to the theoretical quality and richness, the conceptual rigor and the opening of new interpretative paths, as well as the high degree of development of Ibero-Brazilian academic works dedicated to the multiple facets of classical Islam.