Ottoman History Podcast - Intellectual Currents in Early Modern Islam

Episode Date: August 19, 2017

Episode 328 with Khaled El-Rouayheb hosted by Shireen Hamza and Abdul Latif Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The seventeenth century, contrary to popular belief, was a time of great originality and change for scholars in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. In this interview, Khaled El-Rouayheb debunks the many myths of intellectual decline by showing how the intellectual production changed in tandem with major migrations across the Islamic world. We start with the influx of Kurdish and Azeri logicians into the Ottoman Empire, and the new disciplines that they brought with them. We then discuss the movement of scholars from North Africa to Egypt and the Hejaz, and how they insisted on methods of taḥqīq, or verification, rather than taqlīd, or the acceptance of knowledge based on authority alone. Finally, we touch on how the spread of Sufi orders from India and Central Asia into Arabic-speaking regions impacted the development and disputation of the concept of waḥdat al-wujūd, or the unity of being. How does this detailed research on intellectual trends change our understanding of "modernity" and the period we call the "early modern"? « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Shireen Hamza. And I'm Abdul Latif. Today we're recording from Harvard University's Semitic Museum and we're here with our guest, Professor Khaled Ar-Ruwayhib. Khaled Ar-Ruwayhib is the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and Islamic Intellectual History in Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Today, he'll be talking about his recent book, Islamic Intellectual History in the 17th Century, Scholarly Occurrence in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghrib.

This book was published in 2015 with Cambridge University Press. Welcome to the podcast, Professor. Thank you. Happy to be here. Today we're going to attempt a bit of a challenge for one single session of our interviews. We're going to try to cover the entire book, which is vast indeed. So please forgive us, our listeners, if we end up glossing over things. You'll just have to check out the book yourselves. The book is divided into three parts. All three sections are focusing in on scholarly migrations and the impact that these movements had on intellectual history. So it's really connecting up the very rich field of social political history that's already more well

trodden for the Ottoman Empire with a less well-trodden intellectual history. The first section deals with the influx of scholars into the Ottoman Empire, mostly from Kurdish and Azeri areas. The second focuses on the movement eastward of scholars from the Maghrib, and some of them settled in Egypt and in the Hejaz subsequently. And finally, the third section looks at the spread of Sufi orders from India, from Azerbaijan, into largely Arabic-speaking regions and the effect that this had. We're roughly going to follow the structure of the book, and we'll attempt to give listeners at least a taste of each section. Before we get into the material, could you tell us why you chose to focus on the 17th century? Well, the boring answer is that it's a century I know well. The more interesting answer maybe is that it's a century that has been denigrated from the perspective of a number of distinct decline narratives.

So, for example, in Ottoman studies, traditionally the 17th century has been seen as the beginning of the long decline of the Ottoman Empire after its heyday in the 15th and 16th century. In the Arabic literature, of course, the 17th century is part of a long period of decline from the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 to the so-called Nahda, the Renaissance of the 19th century. And from the perspective of people who study so-called revivalist and reformist movements in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Islamic world, the 17th century is a backdrop to that. It's a century that's often thought to have been dominated by unthinking imitation, popular syncretic practices, antinomian Sufism, popular syncretic practices, antinomian Sufism, and that is then presented as the kind of situation that these so-called reformists and modernists and revivalists want to rectify. So from all these angles, the 17th century has tended to be seen as almost as a dark age.

Let's turn to the first section, which focuses on the migration of these Kurdish and Azeri scholars into the Ottoman Empire. Some of them were fleeing from Shah Abbas, and they report studying the books of the Persians and certain rational sciences with them. What does that mean, the books of the Persians, and what sort of consequences on the scholarly environment did this migration have in the Ottoman Empire? So the Books of the Persians, as far as I could determine, is a reference to books on the rational sciences, such as logic, dialectics, rational theology, philosophy by Persian scholars active in the second half of the 15th century and in the early decades of the 16th century. Scholars such as Jalal ad-Din Dawani and some of his students. Dawani is active in Shiraz in the second half of the 15th century. He's a very important logician, theologian, philosopher. There's also the grammarian and rhetorician Issam ad- Isfaraini, who was active in Herat and later in Bukhara in the early decades of the 16th century.

These are some of the scholars who, as far as I could determine, they might have been well known before, but they really start to be regularly studied, commented upon and glossed in the 17th century. Could you tell us a little more about what that means, to gloss a book? To gloss a book is to write marginal comments. The Arabic term is hashia, literally a marginal comment. Since the Timurid age, the 14th century, this becomes an acknowledged literary form for scholarly writing. You pick a well-known text, often a work that is studied in madrasas, and you comment on various passages. Either you explicate them, or if you're a more ambitious scholar, you raise, anticipate objections, raise objections yourself.

It has often been dismissed as nothing but scholastic pedantry, but the recent trend in scholarship is actually to look at these and to recognize that, of course, they could sometimes be the vehicle of pedantry, but they could also, as often as not, be the vehicle for critical reflection on received teachings. So the choice of these Kurdish and Azeri scholars, the books of Dawani, what is significant about the choice to gloss these texts? What does it really show us? Usually when a text is intensely glossed, it means that it's being studied intensively. And each, almost every sentence of their handbooks and their works are being discussed, expounded, sometimes critically debated. These works rhetorically affirm the value of

what I translate as verification. The Arabic term is tahqi. And verification is precisely the ideal that you do not simply accept what your teachers tell you, what previous scholars have said, but you critically reflect. You don't necessarily need to dismiss, but you critically reflect on these teachings by anticipating objections, trying to respond to these objections, thinking in which ways one might criticize or defend these views. And you find this term, tahqik, being deployed by these logicians and other people writing in the rational sciences at this time in the 17th century? Very much so. It's not a new ideal. So if one looks, for example, at the works of Dewani in the 15th century, the prefaces to these works very much are using this rhetoric.

What I'm doing is not just repeating what others have said. This is insufficient. I'm a verifier. So it's not a new ideal, but our sources from the 17th century tend to link the study of these texts in the rational sciences in this critical manner with the ideal of tahqiq, verification. So one Damascene scholar writing towards the end of the 17th century is looking back and to the arrival of a Kurdish scholar in Damascus in the early decades of the 17th century. And he writes that his teachers have told him it is this scholar, this Kurdish

scholar who settles in Damascus in the early decades of the 17th century, who, quote, opened the gate of verification in Damascus. So there is a connection, at least a rhetorical one, between the spread of the study of the works of these scholars with later glosses and the ideal of verification. Fascinating. This seems to be in really direct conflict with the kind of decline narratives that you started the interview out with, that your book really seeks to revise. Did these books, did they spread beyond the Ottoman Empire at all? Many of these texts were also known, say, in the Indian subcontinent, in Central Asia. were also known, say, in the Indian subcontinent, in Central Asia.

They don't seem to have spread as fast, say, in the Maghreb, which has its own intellectual traditions that we maybe get to. But certainly in the so-called Turko-Persianate world, the study of these texts was very widespread. So in the Indian Dersi Nizami curriculum of the early 18th century, which lasts well into the modern period, these texts also play a very prominent role. I think you also mentioned the Lucknow Institution Firangi Mahal in your book, which was really striking to me.

So maybe we could do a demonstration of one of the examples of the sort of art of logic and demonstration that you give in this book. And this discipline is called Adab al-Bath. It's just one of maybe many disciplines that existed within or many genres, sorry, that existed within logic at the time. But maybe just so that our listeners can get a sense of what some of the very introductory material of this vast discipline might look like. So let's say I'm trying to prove that 16-year-olds can vote. How would, I don't know, Tashko Prozadeh question this? Adab al-Bahd is a discipline that really emerges in the 13th, early 14th centuries, and it

becomes an established scholarly discipline in the Turko- early 14th centuries, and it becomes an established scholarly discipline in the Turko-Persianate world after that. I argue that in the 17th century, there is a great increase in interest in this discipline and an increased output. To give you a sense of what this discipline is about, so you ask about extending the vote to 16-year-olds. So according to the rules of this discipline, there are three ways, acknowledged ways, in which you can respond to that. Now, since you make a claim, I think, that voting should be extended to 16-year-olds,

it is incumbent upon you as claimant to give a proof for that. So the burden of proof, so to speak, is on the claimant. There was a recent article in The Economist, which says that 16-year-olds should vote because they are particularly invested in the future. And if you give 16-year-olds the vote, they're more likely to be regular voters in the future and maybe raise the levels of voting participation. One recognized way of objecting is to say, I don't accept a premise of your argument. Say, I don't accept that giving 16-year-olds the vote is going to raise voting participation. I don't accept that premise. Why do you say that? And then it would be incumbent upon you to cite the studies that show that.

So that is called in Arabic, which is to reject the premise of the claimant. Another way of saying that, another way of objecting is to object to the proof, typically by saying the proof is either too weak or too strong. So in the case, if you say 16-year-olds should get the vote because as young people, they are particularly invested in the future, one could say, well, by the same argument, 12-year-olds should vote. The argument is too strong. That is called macht. should vote. The argument is too strong. That is called not. And a third way of arguing is to say, okay, you do have an argument here, but I have an equally compelling argument for the opposite case. For example, one might cite the some psychological studies that suggest that teenagers, the part of their mind or brain that is involved in calculating risks and planning

is weakly still not fully developed. One reason that they seem to be involved in more traffic accidents, for example. So this would be Muharra, though, where I just construct a different argument for the opposing conclusion. So I'm not really objecting to a premise. I'm not objecting to the way you argued. I'm just saying, okay, you have an argument there, but here's an equally compelling case for the opposite conclusion. So these are the three main strategies outlined in these handbooks. It is a very argumentative culture, unlike what many modern scholars and

even many modern people who are not scholars, Madrasa culture in this period is intensely argumentative. Premises, arguments are scrutinized. And this is how a lot of the works that are being studied in Madras is also written. Sounds exhausting. It took many, many years to train an Ottoman scholar or a Safavid scholar or a Mughal scholar. So the kinds of demonstrations that we just had, they seem to be potentially part of either an oral or written disputational culture of learning. potentially part of either an oral or written disputational culture of learning. But were there any other effects on adab al-ba'th? Were they read in any other contexts? I argue in the third chapter of my book that the increased interest in the discipline of adab al-ba'th, scrutinizing arguments, seems to have inspired the first critical reflections that we have in the Islamic tradition on the art of reading.

We start getting, in the 16th century, there's a small treatise being written by an obscure Shiraz scholar, a scholar from Shiraz in Persia, very short on the principles of reading, which is basically applying the principles of adab al-bahd to reading. So you're reading, try to figure out, is this a premise, is this an argument, how can you object? In the 17th century, in the late 17th century, an Ottoman scholar writes the first, his name is Munajjim Bashi, he writes apparently the first extended treatment of

how to read in the islamic tradition so that seems to be i mean there's no simple explanation here it's not all due to adab al-bahd but adab al-bahd is one factor that's feeding into this interest another i would say is the closely related ideal of verification. If you're a verifier, you read in this way. You look at premises, you try to get a sense of the argument, you try to think of possible objections and how they might be answered. So I guess let's move into the second part of your book, where you talk about Mughrabi scholars, some famous, some not as famous, moving eastward into the Ottoman Empire because of the fall of the Sadian dynasty in 1603, the institutionalization of Hajj. Who were some of these scholars and why they decided to

settle in Egypt and the Hejaz? Many of these scholars are not particularly well known. One person who is relatively well known is Ahmed al-Maqqari who writes a famous literary history of Andalus that becomes very popular. He was also a theologian and wrote theological works

that has not been investigated as much. Egypt in the 17th early 18th centuries, enjoying a period of relative economic prosperity is shown by André Rémond in a number of studies, particularly the coffee industry seems to have been a very important factor. Much of the coffee came from the Yemen, but it was exported to the rest of the world via Egypt. Indian Ocean trade.

Yes. So Egypt becomes, starts, I mean, Egypt had, of course, been an important center. It seems to have suffered, though, from a series of plagues in the 14th, 15th centuries. By the 17th century, there are signs of recovery. So this would be a natural magnet for Maghribi scholars, who anyway would pass through Egypt on their way to the Hajj, especially when the Maghrib itself seems to have been going through a period of turmoil with the end of the Saadian dynasty. And it took maybe half a century before political order was restored in Morocco. The Hajj, of course, is an old institution,

but there is evidence that in the Ottoman Empire, when this entire region becomes politically unified, that the Hajj gains even more importance. And it becomes also important as a place where scholars from various parts of the Islamic world would actually meet. There would be very few opportunities otherwise for, say, a scholar from India and a scholar from Morocco to meet in this age. These Maghribi scholars, as they're traveling eastward, are they bringing something that was a specific specialization in the Maghrib or a scholarly tradition in the Maghrib that didn't exist in the East to Egypt and to the Hijaz?

Yes. So I try to argue that particularly the writings on theology, kalam, and logic, mantuq, the writings of the 15th century North African scholar Sanusi, the writings of the 15th century North African scholar Sanusi become widely studied in the course of the 17th century as an effect of this eastward spread of North African scholars into Egypt, the Hejaz, and sometimes also Syria. This is an indigenous tradition of logic and kalam that existed in North Africa. It might not be radically different from what existed in the Middle East before that, but it did have some distinctive features, which I try to tease out.

Could you give us some examples of those features? So, Sanusi is is an Ash'ari. He belongs to the Ash'ari school of theology. Now many people in the Middle East, in Egypt, in Syria, and the Hejaz were also Ash'aris in this period. But he was distinctive in a number of ways, two of which I discuss in the book. One is that he believed that Ash'ari theology should be taught even beyond scholarly circles, that it was not enough for ordinary Muslim believers to accept the creed simply

through imitation of elders and peers, but they needed to know at least enough rational theology to be acquainted with some of the proofs for these beliefs. And that is a view that you find amongst very early Asharis when the Asharis school emerged in the 10th, 11th century in Baghdad and Nishapur. But it is a controversial view and had been largely abandoned by Eastern Ash'aris from the time of Ghazali and the 11th century and onward. But Senussi in this respect has a very radical view. And how do you go beyond the stage of imitation, taqlid, in theology? It is by knowing the proofs which he tended to present in a logical format, i.e. in forms derived from books on logic, which he was also very much interested in. This acceptance of creed, of aqidah, based on something other than logical proofs, perhaps the authority of the teacher, would that be similar to the taqlid, the way that these scholars are using the term taqlid?

Taqlid can mean different things in different academic disciplines. Many of us are familiar with taqlid in law. This is what has often been discussed by modern Islamic reformist, modernist to accept the authority of previous jurists as opposed to ishtihad, which is to go to the sources, the Quran and the hadith, and extract the rulings directly from that. Less well studied is the sense of taqlid, which I think was more present more important in the 17th century which is to lead in for example in Kalam in Nakeda and in theology where if you say you believe in God and you believe that the Prophet Muhammad is his prophet but you are completely floundered when someone asks you well what is

do you have any proof for the well, do you have any proof for the existence of God? Do you have any proof that the prophet Muhammad is indeed a prophet? That was considered unsatisfactory on the grounds that such a person, if presented with such questions, their faith might be weakened. The opposite of taqlid in this sense is not ijtihad. It is, again, tahqiq, verification. It is knowing the proofs for the creed articles of faith that makes you a muhaqqaq and no longer a muqallid. And the theologian Sanusi believed that a muqallid is either a sinner or even maybe ultimately an unbeliever.

Wow. Why I say ultimately unbeliever is that such a person should be treated legally as a Muslim. Just like, say, a hypocrite who says he believes but doesn't really believe. But on the day of judgment, if such a person has no arguments for what he believes or what she believes, he explicitly writes creeds for women as well, such a person might not be saved. So of course, this is a very radical thesis. We have this abundant evidence that even in North Africa, there were lots of scholars who were very uncomfortable with this radical stance. scholars who were very uncomfortable with this radical stance.

But when Muhammad Abdo in the late 19th century writes his Risalat al-Tawheed famously and starts off by denigrating taqlid in theology, this is not new, as is often thought. This is very much in line with the creedal works of Sanusi that Muhammad Abdo would himself have studied as a student in the Azhar in the 19th century. These books on creed for women, what was Senussi really thinking that needed a specification for how creed is written differently for one gender versus another? Okay, just to maybe clarify, when he writes creeds he says these are creeds for

commoners including women and ah okay so it's not specifically just for women but since um there were few women scholars the idea would be this is for generally for non-scholars and he makes a point of saying this also includes women. So the same books that would have been studied by Olimar are basically being recommended for... At least for beginning students. So his most advanced works, I don't think he had any idea that these would be read and studied by non-scholars. But he did write relatively simple creeds. Now, writing relatively simple creeds is nothing new,

but he inserts in that at least one argument for each article of faith, even for non-scholars. In that respect, these creeds are distinctive. Now, some modern scholars saw these relatively simple works by Senussi and thought, oh, look, look at the decline, look how simplistic he is, look how dogmatic he is. They've not actually paid heed to the fact that he did also write longer, more involved works. It's just that he's writing these relatively accessible creeds because he has this very radical view about the insufficiency of taqlid when it comes to religious belief.

Before we move on to the third section of the book, Professor Royhip, would you be willing to read to us perhaps a section of Sunusi's work? Okay, I can read out from the early passages of two of his theological works. In his so-called Long Creed, he wrote the following. The first duty incumbent before anything else on the person who reaches the age of maturity is to exercise his mind on what will lead him with certain demonstrations and clear proofs to knowledge of his Lord, and not to be satisfied with the lowly occupation of taqlid, for this does not avail him on the last day, according to many verifying scholars. And in the introduction to his middle creed, he writes, we praise and thank him for countless bounties, the most precious of which is what he, may he be exalted, has bestowed

of the bounty of faith and coming forth from the darkness and prison of Toclid concerning the creed to the spacious light of correct reasoning that reveals the quintessence of certainty. So one can see here the very strong rhetorical stance against Toclid. And this is picked up by later Moroccan scholars. So in the 17th century, Al-Hassan Al-Yusi, one of the most prominent Moroccan scholars, introduces one of his works on logic

by saying, or by writing, O reader, there may occur in our work things with which you are not familiar, and that you will find nowhere else. Do not hurry to condemn this, whimsically heeding the call of the one who merely relays what others have said, and stitches it together, and for whom the ultimate in knowledge and the aim of all effort is to say, so and so has said. No, by God, we seek refuge in God from blackening folios and stuffing choirs with what people have said and meant, following the well-trodden path of imitation,

as the dull-witted do. There is no difference between an imitator being led and a pack animal being led. So know, O reader, that we have not included in this or other compositions anything besides what we believe to be correct, i.e. concepts and propositions that are evident or correctly argued for. So this is what he writes. And some modern scholars have misunderstood this, taken it out of context and see in Yussi a precursor to the call for Ishtihad. But really, Ishtihad is a concept in Islamic law. And this is not what Yussi is talking about. Yussi is talking about Taklid and the rational sciences, the opposite of which is not Ishtihad, but it is verification, i.e. critical verification of received views. And so one of the claims you make in your book is about how this supposed daghlid in law is almost completely unrelated to what's happening in the intellectual history of

the area. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? So I think that maybe as an effect of a lot of modernist reformist thinking in the modern period, Islamic law has become elevated in the minds of many people, including scholars, as the quintessential Islamic religious discipline. And because people like Muhammad Abdo and Muhammad Iqbal issued this clarion call for Ijtihad and seemed to present Ijtihad as the magic solution to all the woes of Islamic society. There was this assumption that the key to Islamic intellectual development was Ijtihad. But what I try to indicate is that really Ijtihad is a concept that whose primary application is in islamic law so it's not clear that ijtihad would have had any use for say a logician or a grammarian or a sufi

or a philosopher or an astronomer or mathematician such a person isn't going to find answers by going straight to the Quran and the Hadith. Such a person, so Ishtihad really makes not much sense in that context. I may be a little bit polemically say that, okay, let's assume just for the sake of argument that the gate of Ishtihad was in fact closed. I don't think it is, but let's assume for the... Why should that lead to the lack of development in non-legal disciplines? My colleague, my departed and sorely missed colleague,

Shahab Ahmed, in his book, What is Islam?, has precisely pointed out that we need to revise this assumption that Islamic law is really equivalent with Islamic religious thinking. And this prioritizing of law to the exclusion of Sufism, theology, philosophy is something that we need to rethink. Speaking of this exclusion, the Sufi orders in the last part of your book entered from India and Azerbaijan into the Ottoman Empire. And they brought with them new uses of ideas like tahqeeq, verification. And they also brought new ideas about wahdat al-wujud,

this unity of existence, this Ibn Arabi concept into the Hijaz. What were some of the effects of these ideas that they brought? And who were these people? What were these orders bringing them we have from anatolia the helvety order which starts to become a very widespread gains in popularity in the arabic-speaking levant in the 17th century Arabic-speaking Levant in the 17th century. Prior to that, it did exist, but it was not as popular, and it tended primarily to be popular with, say,

Turkish-speaking inhabitants of Cairo, Damascus. From the 17th century, we find a lot of Arabic-speaking khalwatis emerging. From India, we get the Shattari order and also the Naqshbandi order. Also, some of these are coming from Central Asia, the Naqshbandi order. Both Mujaddidi, i.e. followers of Ahmad Sir Hindi, but also non-Mujaddidi Naqshbandis. And the non-Mujaddidi Naqshbandis and the Shattaris and the Khalwatis all seem to have had a much more accepting view of the idea of Wahdat al-Wujud, ultimately traceable to Ibn Arabi, the Andalusian mystic from the early 13th century, mystic from the early 13th century, rather than the Sufi orders that have been prevalent in, say, Egypt and the Levant prior to the 17th century, such as the Shadili order or the Qadri order. One effect is an increasingly open acceptance of the idea of Wahdat al-wujud and citing not so much Ibn Arabi himself,

but his Persianate commentators, such as Sadr al-Din Qunawi and the various later commentators on the fasus al-hikam of Ibn Arabi's fasus al-hikam, such as the famous 15th century Persian mystic Jami. Before we move on, could you give us just a brief definition of what Wahdat al-Wujud may mean in this context? Briefly, Wahdat al-Wujud is the view that God is the only existent, that existence is one and it is divine, so that God is not simply one more thing that exists in the world alongside everything else that also exists, but that really God is the only existent no, we're not saying that tables and chairs and humans and animals are God. We're saying that they're not God, but they are manifestations of the one divine reality.

who were active, say, in Syria and Egypt in the 15th, 16th centuries, seem to have revered Ibn Arabi as a saint, but they try to keep an arm's length to the doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud, playing it down and avoiding the discussion of the later Persianate commentators on Ibn Arabi's most controversial work, which is his very short Fusus al-Hakam, The Bezels of Wisdom. This changes in the 17th century or so I try to show. And we have scholars in Medina or Damascus and later in Cairo who are openly accepting of the ideas of Wahd al-Wujud and other controversial ideas attributed to Ibn Arabi. Prominent among these would be Ibrahim Qurani in Medina and Abdelkhani al-Nabulsi in Damascus,

all active in the second half of the 17th century and the case of Nabulsi also the early decades of the 18th. Now the consequences of this are quite surprising, at least I was surprised by it. Often the school of Ibn Arabi has been accused of leading to antinomianism, syncretism, but in actual fact what seems to have happened is that with the spread of this kind of mystical monism is an attack on established Ash'ari and Maturidi theology and a reversion to ideas in theology that are actually quite reminiscent of the Hanbali school of law, which tends to be dismissing of, say, figurative interpretations of apparent anthropomorphisms in the Quran and Hadith. Could you give us an example of one such sentence? So, for example, in the story of Moses and the burning bush in the Quran, the Arabic

seems to suggest that the burning bush is God. And most commentators would try to deny that the Arabic, the one who is in the fire is actually God, because that is problematic, of course, theologically. But for the Ibn Arabi school, there's no problem saying God has manifested himself in the fire he manifests himself in other things as well similarly the famous quranic passages which suggests that god is seated on a throne for example or that god has eyes and hands again these tended to be interpreted figuratively in almost all schools of theology but the hanbali

school of law was virulently opposed to these kinds of figurative reinterpretations and said we just need to accept the text as it is and surprisingly the ibn Arabi school of mysticism tends to agree with the Hanbalis. Of course, on a ground that maybe not all Hanbalis would be happy with, but on the grounds that God manifests himself in the phenomenal world. And these manifestations can be described as having eyes and ears and being seated on a throne or being in a fire, even though God in himself is completely unlike anything that can be conceived or thought. It's a fascinating convergence there. And they actually go out of their way, people like Ibrahim Qawrani in the 17th century, go out of their way to find and rehabilitate the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah, the famous 14th century Hanbali religious thinker

who is famously critical of the Ash'ari school of theology. And there is a suggestion that it was actually people like Qur'ani who rediscover Ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah had, of course, always been read within the Hanbali school of law, but he seems to have been a little read scholar outside of the minority Hanbali school of law. But with the efforts of people like Qur'ani, he starts the process of the rediscovery of Ibn Taymiyyah that is such an important part of the 19th century Sunni revivalist movement where Ibn Taymiyyah moves from being an idiosyncratic, maybe even maverick scholar, to being one of the central figures in the Islamic religious tradition for many modern Salafis.

Yeah, so in the book's introduction, you talk about how intellectual trends in Ottoman Empire and the North African world should be understood on their own terms before doing the so-called global work, in part to avoid problems that comes from taking European intellectual history terms and ideas and transposing them. Right. Perhaps someone might say that this call for Ijtihad is an enlightenment. Yeah. So it just ends up being somewhat problematic. So now that we've talked about these intellectual currents that did exist, can you talk about the implications of your work for those people who are doing studies on this period or around this period?

There are so many, you know, current conferences on global early modernities trying to understand this time period in various regions outside of Europe. Many of them are sort of pointing towards looking beyond traditional markers of progress, like print culture or rates of literacy based on a Western model. like print culture or rates of literacy based on a Western model. And for example, the second portion of the book in which you're really talking about the popularization of creed. And this is very striking. So how do you what would you sort of contribute to this more global conversation? I am I'm all for a global conversation. And I have had a chance to discuss my work

with people who work on China in this period. I found the works of Benjamin Ellman, one of whose books is called On Their Own Terms on Science in China, to be valuable for me. But I think in order to have a proper conversation with others, we need to develop our study of our own region of the world sufficiently for the conversation to be on more equal terms, as opposed to European historians thinking up of terms such as modernity or enlightenment or humanism

and then we are expected to sort of find these things in our own fields I think we can do better than that so I'm all for a discussion of comparative discussions, I think it's valuable

but the agenda of research has to be set within our field. If it's set too early by questions that have been asked outside of our field, we risk getting into the situation, which I've borrowed a term from development theory, the development of underdevelopment. We ask questions that are purely guided by historiographical points and theories that have developed, say, in European history. And then this is what we look for in our field. Now, to be more concrete, and I think the intellectual history of the Islamic world, particularly, say, the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century is still quite underdeveloped. I think that's we can participate actively and on equal terms with people who work on this period, say, in Europe.

This does not mean that we do not have a conversation before that stage. my own work, say, on the value of verification, I think I would personally question the self-understanding that many European historians have of European history in this period, that with, say, the Enlightenment, we have this rhetoric of daring to use one's own reason, as Kant famously said. Well, daring to use one's reason is a rhetorical trope that exists in the Islamic world in the 18th century. Of course, they derive wildly different conclusions than Kant himself did. Once we look at the scholarly traditions of the non-European world, and we see that the value of argumentation, the value of critical reflection was well established, at least as a value. The self-understanding of many historians of the Enlightenment and of

modernity, that with the Enlightenment and the modernity, we first get the value of critical reflection and what we had before was somehow reliance on others becomes exposed. I'm sorry. Yes, becomes dark lead, right? Becomes exposed as groundless. So the self-understanding of modernity as an age of reason and rational reflection, which sometimes even is picked up by people who are not happy with modernity and think that with modernity we lose some kind of primordial, prelapsarian, romantic, being at one with faith and with nature.

I mean, but whether we give it a positive spin or a negative spin, the idea that European modernity has a monopoly of critical reflection and of the rhetoric of daring to use one's own reason, daring to question authority, becomes exposed. So that's one way in which the very little step that we are doing now and looking at the intellectual history of this period that we can engage in a conversation. that we can engage in a conversation. The reflections on how to read are things that that chapter was initially published in a volume on world philology, which tries precisely to look at philology not just in a European humanistic context, but also in, amongst both Muslim scholars and Sanskrit scholars, in East Asia, where in the early modern period we have a new Confucianism and an interest in old Confucian texts.

So I think discussions and comparisons can be enriching and are very important. and comparisons can be enriching and are very important, but we need to do a lot of work with the primary texts of our tradition before we can be completely equal partners in this conversation. And that's something I feel very strongly about, also because some of the secondary literature, valuable as it is, has tended to accept terms like humanism or enlightenment or Cartesianism when talking about Islamic scholars in the 17th and 18th century. And that's something that I think we have to be a little bit cautious about. And again, I think we can do better than simply

importing these concepts. And I personally, and maybe this is also controversial, but I think even the word modernity is something that is ready for reflection and critical reflection and shouldn't simply not be taken over by Toclid. The idea that if something is 17th, 18th century, then it's somehow modern. Why? And I think it's valuable to reflect. And maybe the end of the reflection is to salvage modernity or to understand it better. And maybe it's the end of the discussion would be to think of better terms. Thank you so much, Professor Raheib, for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I really enjoyed having you. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Listeners interested in learning more about this topic can find a bibliography on our website, www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where Professor Uwe Hibb has kindly provided a few titles on the topic, and we hope that you'll tune in next time. Bye.