Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century

Khaled El-Rouayheb

Paperback

9781107617568

Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb

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.

Contents

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'

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

7. The spread of mystical monism

8. Monist mystics and neo-Hanbali traditionalism

9. In defense of wahdat al-wujud.