7/29/2019 rveiew of majnun by michael dols

1/2

296 History Workshop Journalporation into official discourse, mostnotably the White Poppy campaign ofthe Women's Co-operative Guild, op-posed by the British Legion on thegrounds that it diverted funds from theHaig Poppy Appeal. Despite thesechanges, Remembrance Day, and itscentre, the two-minute silence, re-mained a widely shared and unifyingexperience throughout the 1930s. Ironi-cally, this was to be ended by the declar-ation of war in September 1939.

Central to this impressive study of themeanings of R emem brance Day is Gre-gory's insistence on the continuing im-portance of the 'language of sacrifice' inshared, public memories of war. It isonly through a widespread acceptance

of, and identification with, such a lan-guage, -that war deaths become beara-ble, and war itself becomes acceptable.The language of remembrance acts todisguise dominant ideologies just as itacts to console the bereaved. TheBritish live in a nation which not onlycelebrates the Second World War, inwhich millions died, as a central aspectof its national identity, but which alsouses the public memory of this war aspart of the rhetoric which justified theact of sending young men away to killand die in the Falklands and Gulf wars.This book provides a potent reminderof the pow er of the language of sacrificein past wars as a means of justifyingfuture ones.

Short ReviewsMICHAEL W. DOLS, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, edited by

Diane E. Imm ischOxford, Clarendon Press, pp. xvi. 543, ISBN 0-19-820221-0reviewed by Aziz Al-Azmeh

This posthumous work by Michael Dolsset itself the very ambitious task ofreconstructing the question of madnessin 'medieval Islamic soc iety'. A work ofgreat erud ition, the book begins with anaccount of medieval Arabic medical no-tions of madness, which constituted ahighly systematized and concatenatedversion of Galenic humoural notions anddetailed accounts of melancholic path-ology. The book then moves on tohospitalization, care within the family,and to various kinds of treatm ent, physi-cal and psychological, such as cauteri-zation, purgation, suggestion, music,restraint, and exorcism. Religious heal-ing and the allied notions of possessionand its cognates are then taken up.Three types of fools are then discussed:

the romantic fool who lost his mindbecause of love, the wise fool, and theholy fool. Finally, the status of mentaldeficiency and incapacity in Muslim legaltext is sketched.The task set by the au thor was clearlyformidable, and the main interest of thebook, I think, lies in its indication of thewide purview of the topic and the multi-plicity of literature it calls up: medical,religious, literary, legal. The treatmentof the material, however, is unfortu-nately gravely wanting, and the materialseems to have been haphazardly ar-ranged, or rather simplistically classi-fied, along topical lines, without theemergence of lines of analysis or ofaugmentation. The reader also gets thedistinct air of an unfinished book

byguestonAugust20,2013

pdf.hi

ghwire.org

Downloadedfrom

http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/

7/29/2019 rveiew of majnun by michael dols

2/2

Reviews 29 7(though it did have an editor), with muchredundant material comprising theauthor's written-up notes - for instance,on the history of Galenism, on the cult ofMuhammad - and with too many ty-pographic errors, misreadings of Arabicwords, and small errors of fact.The best accounts in the book are ofthe m edical notions of insanity, and thelegal treatments of the loss of reason.These are, after all, based on bodies ofliterature quite easy to interpret andparaphrase. For the rest, the book seemsconstrained by a very old-fashionedorientalism, hidebound by a textualistnotion of reality and a rather rudimen-tary philological mode of interpretation .The book does not yield a consequentialsense of history, and seems confined in a'medieval Islamic society' which appearshomogeneous and which lasts until

today, from which ethno-psychiatricstudies are used to make arguments con-cerning the Middle Ages. Thoughglimpses of this fascinating topic are pro -vided, the opportunity is missed to treatthe material according to methods of his-torical study which are standard in otherhistories. It is inadequa te, in the study ofthe romantic fool, for instance, to para-phrase two or three literary treatmentsof the topos. There is in existence a largebody of anecdotal, hagiographical, his-torical, and biographical material whichcould have been used for depicting thevarious social, imaginary, medical andother constructions of madness acrossthe whole span of medieval and earlymodern Muslim societies, but this morefruitful but rather more demanding andtheoretically sophisticated approach wasunfortunately not considered.

HARRY HENDRICK, Child Welfare. England 1872-1989.London: Rou tledge, 1994. ISBN 0415 007739. P p. xv + 354. L45.00.reviewed by Jane Lewis

There are so remarkably few generalbooks on the history of children that Iwas unsure as to what to expect from thisone. Harry Hendrick states clearly thathis approach to the subject of childwelfare will be through social policy. Yeteven with the parameters of his subjectrelatively closely defined, the territoryhe covers is huge, ranging through thelate nineteenth-century work of rescueand reclamation, and infant life protec-tion, to the early twentieth-century childwelfare movement, the inter-war em-phasis on child psychology and mentaltesting, and the post-war stress on delin-quency and most recently on childabuse. Inevitably the focus on socialpolicy means that much of interest andimportance cannot be pursued, for ex-ample legislation on the age of consentand punishment of incest require much

more discussion of sexuality. But Hen-drick has performed a great service inwriting a textbook of this kind, in par-ticular it is extremely valuable to havethe post-war treatm ent of children set ina longer historical perspective.The relationship between parents,children and the state is in any case avaluable starting point in the history ofchildren. It was as great a preoccupationat the beginning of this century as it isproving to be at the end of it, and it hasnot received adequate recognition fromhistorians who have tended to focusrather exclusively on the struggle be-tween individualism and collectivism. Inso far as the relationship betweenparents, children and the state has at-tracted attention at all, it has tended totake the form of a debate about how farthe state has sought to impose predomi-

byguestonAugust20,2013

pdf.h

ighwire.org

Downloadedfrom

http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/http://pdf.highwire.org/