Guided Review Final Assignment, WQ 2020

Guided Review Final Assignment, WQ 2020

(200 points)

For your final assignment you are to write an analytic review of the book assigned. You are to follow the guidelines below explicitly. Variance or deviation from these directions will result in lower grade. Where appropriate, you should cite passages in the text to support your analysis.

1. Provide a proper citation of all relevant bibliographic data, following the citation format provided here. Place this citation at the top of your first page where it will serve as the title of your paper.

Ross E. Dunn. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14^th Century. Revised edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. 359 + xxiv.

2. In your opening paragraph, identify the subject matter of the book. Your first job in a review is to tell the reader what the book is about.

3. Your next task is to identify and discuss the author’s interpretation of the subject matter. Remember that historians do not just compile facts, they interpret them. What is the author’s main thesis—i.e., the point she wishes to prove in the book? Is this thesis explicit or tucked away between the lines? What are the presuppositions as to what is important, what is the relevant evidence, etc.?

4. It is useful to delineate how the author pursues her argument: so your next task is to analyze the structure of the book. What is the topic and the purpose of each chapter? How do they fit together?

5. Authors usually have some attitude or feeling towards the subjects they write about; this attitude is called tone. So, what tone of voice does the author address towards his subject? Is the author sympathetic, ironic, partisan, or condescending?

6. Discuss why the author wrote this book. All authors have some purpose in mind in writing, and some have an agenda—i.e., they are advocating that a particular course of action be taken. Does it have an agenda? Is that agenda overt or hidden? An aspect of this issue is audience: What is the intended audience of the book?

7. A book of historical analysis must be based on evidence; otherwise it is fiction. So you need to discuss what kind of evidence the author used. Why did she chose this evidence? Why not other kinds?

8. Finally, you are to mention what kind of contribution this book has made to your understanding of the history of the Islamic community over the period 1000-1500 CE. (We will discuss this further in class)

Your paper is to be typed (double-spaced, using 10-12 point font, with standard margins) and six to seven pages in length. Please number your pages. While length is secondary to fulfillment of the obligations above, experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to address well the demands of this assignment in fewer than six pages. The grading rubric mentioned in the comparison/contrast paper instructions still applies.

This is a good beginning. I have organized my comments around the 8 required elements.

1. It is good that you updated the publication data to reflect that we are reading the 2012 edition
2. The best thing to do for this point is to find what Dunn himself says his book is trying to do. Check the preface to the 1986 edition, second paragraph, for example.  Authors frequently use this front matter to inform the reader what their wider goals are. On another note, the book is not “a narration of the travels” although the travels provide the unifying thread through the 14 chapters.  If you look at each of the destination chapters, while there is always a subsection on how/where/when IB travelled, the fact that there are other subsections tells us that Dunn is doing more than just rehashing IB’s itinerary. What are those things?
3. IN this section as written, it is difficult to tell who is saying what. Keep in mind that you are not to do the interpreting of IB’s travels, you are to identify what Dunn is doing. Whenever possible, support your argument about Dunn’s approach by using citations from the book itself.  It is nice to refer to the Burke and Robert secondary source, but don’t expand your paper to further develop their ideas.   As an example, look at your paragraph beginning “merchants controlled trade”.  Who said this? What purpose does citing it serve? Does it represent a major concern of Dunn’s? If yes, provide page numbers from the Dunn text (don’t call it the Ross text in your parenthetical citations).
4. The book has one introduction and 14 chapters, not 15 chapters including the introduction. Precision matters. In this part I expect a blow by blow accounting of the chapters. What does one do? How does it set up 2? How does 2 build off 1, what does 2 do, and then how does 2 set up 3, etc. through 14.
5. Your job here is to read through the text to find clues about Dunn’s tone towards his subject. In other words to identify his tone(s). There is no need to insert extraneous elements such as what might be the result of Dunn doing something which he didn’t do.
6. You are on the right track here—it is a goal of the book to introduce the world of IB to a general audience, not an audience of fellow specialists. So again, the best strategy here is cite Dunn’s own words where he says what he is doing.  The prefaces and introduction are good places to review for this, as well as looking at the last chapter, and even the beginnings and endings of the chapters themselves.
7. The Muslim calendar, the maps and photos are not so much sources as they are aids for the reader, although of course a knowledge of the Muslim calendar helps the reader better understand the book. The place to look for the sources used by the author are the chapter endnotes and the bibliography. As I mentioned at the start of class, Dunn relied upon primary sources from the era of IB AND the works of specialists who have studied IB, his itinerary and analyzed related topics. These may be secondary sources, but they are also part of the building blocks Dunn uses to support his analyses and conclusions.
8. This is your section. Let me know how the book contributed (or not) to your understanding of the topics of the course, etc.