Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb

by Khaled El-Rouayheb

For much of the twentieth century, the intellectual life of the Ottoman and Arabic-Islamic world in the seventeenth century was ignored or mischaracterized by historians. Ottomanists typically saw the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured – and text-centered – understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.

Genres: Islam, History, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction

415 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2015

About the author

Khaled El-Rouayheb is James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History at Harvard University.

Khaled El-Rouayheb’s research interests include: the intellectual and cultural history of the Arabic-Islamic world in the Mamluk and early-Ottoman periods (1200-1800); the history of Arabic logic; Islamic theology and philosophy. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), a MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), and a PhD (2003) from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

His publications include three monographs: Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Relational Syllogisms & the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900 (Brill, 2010), and Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has also prepared an edition of Kashf al-asrar ‘an ghawamid al-afkar, a summa of logic by Afdal al-Din al-Khunaji (d.1248) (Iranian Institute for Philosophy, 2010). He is the co-editor (along with Sabine Schmidtke of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton) of The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016).

Reviews

[Yaseen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific work in displaying the continuation of the intellectual activity of Muslim scholars in an era often referred to as stagnant. The tripartite approach to the intellectual history of the era showed the diversity of thought and continued intellectual discourse not only within one area of scholarship but multiple. For those interested in Islamic intellectual history, this is a must-read.