Research Catalog

Title

Islamic intellectual history in the seventeenth century : scholarly currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb / Khaled El-Rouayheb, Harvard University.

Author

El-Rouayheb, Khaled

Publication

New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Supplementary Content

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Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 399 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• "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"--
• "Dominant narratives of Islamic intellectual history have tended to be unkind to the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Three independent narratives of 'decline'--an Ottomanist, an Arabist, and an Islamist--have converged on deprecating the period as either a sad epilogue to an earlier Ottoman florescence or a dark backdrop to the later Arab 'renaissance' and Islamic 'revival.' Until recently, Ottomanists typically located the heyday of Ottoman cultural and intellectual achievement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566, the Empire was supposed to have entered a period of long decline that affected both its political-military fortunes and its cultural-intellectual output. Scholars of Arabic literature and thought were inclined to view the seventeenth century as yet another bleak chapter of cultural, intellectual and societal 'decadence' that began with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and only came to an end with the 'Arab awakening' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--

Subjects

• Africa, North > Intellectual life > 17th century
• POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory
• Turkey > Intellectual life > 17th century
• Muslim scholars > Turkey > History > 17th century
• Learning and scholarship > Africa, North > History > 17th century
• Muslim philosophers > Turkey > History > 17th century
• Muslim philosophers > Africa, North > History > 17th century
• Learning and scholarship > Turkey > History > 17th century
• Muslim scholars > Africa, North > History > 17th century

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Part I. The Path of the Kurdish and Persian Verifying Scholars -- 1. Kurdish scholars and the reinvigoration of the rational sciences -- 2. A discourse of method : the evolution of adab al-bahth -- 3. The rise of deep reading -- Part II. Saving Servants from the Yoke of Imitation -- 4. Maghrebi theologian-logicians in Egypt and the Hejaz -- 5. The condemnation of imitation (taqlid) -- 6. Al-Hasan al-Yusi and two theological controversies in seventeenth-century Morocco -- Part III. The Imams of Those Who Proclaim the Unity of Existence -- 7. The spread of mystical monism -- 8. Monist mystics and neo-Hanbali traditionalism -- 9. In defense of wahdat al-wujud.

Call Number

JFE 15-4852

ISBN

• 9781107042964 (hardback : alkaline paper)
• 1107042968 (hardback : alkaline paper)

LCCN

2015010600

OCLC

910936298

Author

El-Rouayheb, Khaled, author.

Title

Islamic intellectual history in the seventeenth century : scholarly currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb / Khaled El-Rouayheb, Harvard University.

Publisher

New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Research Call Number

JFE 15-4852