The intellectual life of the Arab-Islamic world between the 15th and 19th centuries remains a neglected field of study, largely because of the widespread assumption that Arab-Islamic culture entered a long period of stagnation after the 13th century. According to this narrative, it was only with European military and economic expansion in the 19th century that the Arab-Islamic world “awoke” from its intellectual torpor. In the last two decades scholars have challenged this narrative, and the present panel aims to contribute to the debate by exploring a range of topics. Proceeding in rough chronological order, the first paper examines the holy cities of the Hijaz as a major center of Muslim intellectual and cultural production in the 17th century, drawing and re-exporting pilgrims, students, and Sufi adepts from throughout Afro-Eurasia. It focuses on a group of prominent scholars and highlights their controversial approaches to Islamic mysticism, their possible role as antecedents to 18th-century religious reform, and the geographical orientation of their wide-flung social networks. Set in Syria, the second paper considers evolutions in the concept of justice in the 17th and 18th centuries. It argues that a set of treatises critical of Ottoman resettlement policies marked a change in scholarly expectations of good governance, and it links them to the broader process of political decentralization taking place throughout the Arab provinces at the time. Turning from intellectual production to consumption, the third paper examines change and continuity in the library holdings of an urban notable family in Aleppo from the 17th to the 18th century. It assesses the influence on the library of contemporaneous intellectual and religious developments, among them the trans-regional migration of scholars of "verification" (tahqiq) with special training in rhetoric, logic, and theology; the spread of new mystical Islamic orders from North Africa and Central Asia; and, in the context of Ottoman political decentralization, an evolution in the central texts of the Hanafi school of law, the official school of the empire. Returning to intellectual production, the final paper presents a social and literary analysis of the “commoner” chronicle of the 18th-century Levant. Originally a genre monopolized by the learned class (ulama), the chronicle in 18th century was appropriated by members of other classes (artisans, farmers, and soldiers) and was correspondingly reshaped. The paper examines embedded tragi-comic narratives as moments of laughter during which the powerful (i.e. the ulama and other elites) were mocked.
This paper begins at the intersection of post-classical, pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, on the one hand, and the political history of pre-Tanzimat Ottoman Syria, on the other. Historians of Islamic intellectual life generally consider the period after the middle of the 13th century to be marked by intellectual conservatism, if not outright cultural decline. However, work by social historians interested in the application of shari'a (through the study of bountiful fatawa collections) has chipped away at these dismal assessments. This paper continues in this vein by looking at how the concept of injustice (al-zulm, al-zulama, and other related terms) was understood in its myriad theological, philosophical, historical, and socio-psychological dimensions, above and beyond the particulars of specific legal opinions.
Historians of Ottoman Syria have determined that the middle of the 18th century saw an unprecedented level of political autonomy in the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Most historians attribute the triumph of "localism" to the resourcefulness of Syrian political and military elites and the pragmatism of Ottoman central authorities at a time of administrative crisis. Little attention has been paid to the intellectual atmosphere which accompanied this political transformation.
The central primary source for this discussion is Yass b. Mustafa al-Faradi's (fl. 1676) Kitab nusrat al-mutagharribin 'an al-awtan 'ala al-zulama wa-ahl al-udwan, an indictment of Ottoman forced resettlement policies based on an analysis of shari'a and Islamic political theory and practice. Al-Faradi's text will be placed in the context of the work of other contemporaries, including several treatises by 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (d. 1731). The paper concludes with a look at a political history of Bilad al-Sham by Muhammad ibn Kannan (fl. 1740), Al-Mawakib al-Islamiyya fi al-mamalik wa-al-mahasin al-Shamiyya which may be the first political history of geographic Syria of the entire Islamic period.
The paper concludes that the relative political autonomy of 18th-century Syria was accompanied by ideas about justice and injustice which, in turn, have implications for our understanding of the connection between politics and intellectual life during this period.
The conventional view of intellectual and more generally cultural life in the Arab lands after the 13th century, and especially under Ottoman rule, remains primarily one of conservatism, if not stagnation. In the last two decades scholars have begun to challenge this view, with studies that highlight, within the context of Early Modern globalization, the fertile, long-distance exchange of ideas within the Afro-Eurasian Islamic world. At the geographical center of the Muslim World, the Arab provinces in the 17th and 18th centuries witnessed multiple intellectual and cultural developments.
This paper seeks to discern elements of continuity and change in the intellectual horizons and reading habits of a single urban notable family, the Tahazades of Aleppo, from the 1680s to the 1750s. The examination will be based on two extensive book lists, the first taken from a probate inventory at the death of Mustafa Efendi Tahazade (d. 1680), and the second taken from a deed of endowment by Mustafa Efendi's grandson, Ahmad Efendi, creating a public library in 1752. Both individuals had similar professional interests: they served as judges in the Ottoman court system and engaged in extensive commercial activities.
The questions driving the analysis are taken from current debates on the content and scope of intellectual life. The first question concerns to what extent the Tahazades, as members of the Aleppan social elite, were engaged in Islamic trans-regional scholarly and mystical developments. One of these developments was the introduction of a range of new handbooks and teaching methods in the fields of grammar, semantics-rhetoric, logic, and theology, mostly of either Persian or Maghribi origin. These scholars were usually described as scholars of "verification" (tahqiq). Another development was the spread of originally non-Arabic mystical orders such as the Shattariyya, Naqshbandiyya, and Khalwatiyya in the region, which appears to have had the effect of strengthening support for controversial monist doctrines. The second question has to do with the degree to which Tahazades as practitioners of the Hanafi legal rite embraced relatively new and regionally specialized works of jurisprudence, especially in the context of growing provincial political autonomy. The third and final question relates to the broader question of the Tahazades' interest in scholarly literature of the Early Modern period (1500-1800). That is, did the Tahazades place value in scholarly works produced after the 13th century, the conventional ending to the "classical" age of Arab-Islamic florescence?
