Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T21:17:20.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

OPENING THE GATE OF VERIFICATION: THE FORGOTTEN ARAB–ISLAMIC FLORESCENCE OF THE 17TH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2006

Khaled El-Rouayheb
Affiliation:
Khaled El-Rouayheb is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9BS, U.K.; e-mail: ke217@cam.ac.uk.

Extract

Little research has been done on the intellectual life of the Arab-Islamic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. This scholarly neglect almost certainly reflects the widespread assumption that intellectual life in the Arab-Islamic world entered a long period of stagnation or “sclerosis” after the 13th or 14th century. This state of affairs is often believed to have lasted until the 19th century, when European military and economic expansion awakened the Arab-Islamic world from its dogmatic slumber, and inaugurated a “reawakening” or “renaissance” (nahḍa). An influential statement of this view of intellectual life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire before the 19th century is to be found in Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West. Although they noted that “the barrenness of the period has been greatly exaggerated,” they still stated that Arabic scholarly culture had degenerated, on the whole, into a rote, unquestioning acquisition of a narrow and religiously dominated field of knowledge. No “quickening breath had blown” on Arab-Islamic scholarship for centuries. Isolated even from Persian and Turkish influences, it was reduced to “living on its own past.”

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)