LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Megan Ward. Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2018. Pp. 216. $64.95 (cloth).

Photo by inakihxz from unsplash

remained until retirement in 1975 (he was, concurrently, director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 1959–1976). Thompson describes how, as decolonization accelerated, Anderson studied and shaped the legal codes… Click to show full abstract

remained until retirement in 1975 (he was, concurrently, director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 1959–1976). Thompson describes how, as decolonization accelerated, Anderson studied and shaped the legal codes of the new states that emerged from the British Empire, assuming that the West would serve as the model of development and progress for other societies. Between the late 1940s and mid-1970s, Anderson attempted, with varying degrees of success, to build a “transnational coalition of Muslim legal reformers committed to “‘liberalising,’ ‘modernising’ and codifying Islamic law” (7) in, primarily, North Africa (Libya, Tunisia), West Africa (Nigeria), and South Asia (India, Pakistan). Thompson’s fascinating final chapter considers critical responses to Anderson’s approach to Islamic reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of Anderson’s research students took issue with his approach, as did prominent critics of Orientalism such as the Pakistan-based American convert to Islam, Maryam Jameelah (1934–2012) and, in Britain, the historian A. L. Tibawi (1910–1981), who attacked Anderson’s meddling in Muslim affairs and argued that attempts to transform Islam through “Westernization” or “modernization” were simply to render it as close as possible to Protestant Christianity. Tibawi is one of the few British-basedMuslims cited in the book, and it is unclear howmuch contact and discussion Anderson had with Muslim intellectuals or the growing Muslim communities in postwar Britain. Thompson does mention Anderson’s response to calls from British Muslim leaders in the 1970s for the formal recognition of Islamic law in Britain, which Anderson rigorously opposed. He argued that Britain had accommodated other minorities such as Jews without officially recognizing their religious laws and questioned why it should risk creating a “community within a community” at a time when Muslim-majority countries and those with significant Muslim minorities such as India were edging toward “the establishment of one secular law applicable to all citizens” (243–44). Thompson did not set out to write Anderson’s life story, but the omission of biographical detail makes it difficult to get a feel for the man or a sense of his world outside of the church and academia and, consequently, to understand how those experiences might have influenced him. Thompson notes toward the end of the book that Anderson’s understanding about social justice was raised by his socialist son, Hugh, but does not consider, for example, the influence of Anderson’s wife of sixty years, Patricia, or the impact of the tragic and premature deaths of their three children in the 1970s. That said, this book succeeds in its aim of showing how Anderson helped to reconfigure theological responses to Islam in the twentieth century. It is meticulously researched (more than a third is taken up with endnotes and an extensive bibliography) and will especially appeal to those interested in Christian-Muslim relations, Islam, Islamic law, Orientalism, and missiology in the twentieth century, as well as in modern British intellectual and religious history more broadly.

Keywords: law; ward seeming; anderson; seeming human; megan ward; islamic law

Journal Title: Journal of British Studies
Year Published: 2019

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.