First paragraph: Josef van Ess’s latest work is a monumental study of the Islamic heresiographic tradition in Arabic and in Persian literatures. In the style of his colossal history of early Islamic theology, the six-volume Theologie und Gesellschaft (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991-1997), van Ess surveys in this book writings about religious divi-sions within Islam. We have come to call these works heresiographies, although that word, which has its origins in Christian literature, does not fully apply. There are not in Islam heresies like there are in Christianity. Where there is no center of orthodoxy there can be no heresies, van Ess argues, and in Islam orthodoxy has always been in the eye of the beholder, meaning the author of whatever heresiography one is looking at (II, 1298-1308).

First paragraph: Josef van Ess’s latest work is a monumental study of the Islamic heresiographic tradition in Arabic and in Persian literatures. In the style of his colossal history of early Islamic theology, the six-volume Theologie und Gesellschaft (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991-1997), van Ess surveys in this book writings about religious divi-sions within Islam. We have come to call these works heresiographies, although that word, which has its origins in Christian literature, does not fully apply. There are not in Islam heresies like there are in Christianity. Where there is no center of orthodoxy there can be no heresies, van Ess argues, and in Islam orthodoxy has always been in the eye of the beholder, meaning the author of whatever heresiography one is looking at (II, 1298-1308).