Lawrence Rosen

Lawrence Rosen is an emeritus professor at Princeton University and at Columbia Law School. His books include Varieties of Muslim Experience and The Culture of Islam.

Letter

Unfair to Geertz

6 March 2014

Thomas Meaney grossly distorts Clifford Geertz’s approach to development when he says that ‘Geertz’s scholarship lent an aura of expertise to US imperial projects in the 1960s’ (LRB, 6 March). Geertz did not argue that the ‘backward, obstructive values’ of the Javanese would ‘never allow them to produce the necessary surplus that would lead to industrialisation’: he was describing a...

Isn’t the opposite equally true? Between Sunni and Shi’a

Lawrence Rosen, 19 November 2020

Of all​ the world’s trouble spots few are more susceptible than the Middle East to being seen in terms of binary oppositions. One particularly murky dichotomy is between Sunni and Shi’a, the one accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims, the other constituting the majority in Iran and a large minority in many parts of the Gulf. Analogies we may want to reach for...

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