LAUSR

examined in the Encyclopedia of Islam than in John Pair Brown (1868), James Creagh (1880), and Thomas Hughes’s A Dictionary of Islam (1886). Hughes, for instance, had been a missionary in India and wrote his book, as he stated in his 1885 introduction “to the Government official called to administer justice to Muslim peoples; to the Christian missionary engaged in controversy with Muslim scholars; to the Oriental traveler seeking hospitality amongst Muslim peoples” (Hughes, 290). Such a view does not reflect the rigors of modern scholarship, which may help to explain why Hughes made mistakes. On some occasions, Butler corrected Hughes’s mistakes, but he referenced authors on Islam who did not take into account academic research (Sharfaat, 301), and he quoted from sources of uncertain authority (305, Dictionary of Spiritual Terms). My second reservation concerns generalizations. While Butler consulted scholars on conundrums in Turkish history and language, and cited the most recent studies in the field, he did not consult scholars on Islam—an area that was clearly not his forte. Do all Muslims believe that “only a member of the Quraish tribe . . . could be a prophet or successor to Muhammad” (307)? True, the caliph had to be a member of Quraish, but was there to be another “prophet” from Quraish? Do the one-billion-plus Muslims in the world believe that “hell is divided into seven parts”? (Do all Christians in the world believe that there are seven mortal sins?) This and other generalizations about “Islam” and “Muslims” (“according to Muslims”), and repeatedly stated without any scholarly support, are disturbing. And what exactly is the value of referring to the Taliban (322) and their abhorrence of music in the twenty-first century? Would an edition of a seventeenth-century Muslim description of Europe need to appeal to presentism and mention a contemporary Western aberration? And how reliable is hearsay in confirming Rycaut’s views (“In our own day, I am informed that” [312])? It is unfortunate that Butler did not take as seriously his research about Islam as he did about other subjects. Still, this edition of The Present State in the ACMRS series is a must for students and scholars alike who wish to examine a foundational text about England’s knowledge of the early modern Ottoman world.