Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century

Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb

Khaled El-Rouayheb

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107042964
• eBook ISBN: 9781316355022
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration, Dates, and Translations
• Introduction
• Part I: “The Path of the Kurdish and Persian Verifying Scholars”
• Part II: Saving Servants from the Yoke of Imitation
• Part III: The Imams of Those Who Proclaim the Unity of Existence
• References
• Index