Download PDF | Khaled El-Rouayheb - Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century_ Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb-Cambridge University Press (2015).
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Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb 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 Ottomancontrolled territory.
Khaled El-Rouayheb is James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He specializes in Arabic and Islamic intellectual history, especially in the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (2005) and Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900 (2010). He is also coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy.
Introduction Dominant narratives of Islamic intellectual history have tended to be unkind to the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Three independent narratives of “decline” – an Ottomanist, an Arabist, and an Islamist – have converged on deprecating the period as either a sad epilogue to an earlier Ottoman florescence or a dark backdrop to the later Arab “renaissance” and Islamic “revival.” Until recently, Ottomanists typically located the heyday of Ottoman cultural and intellectual achievement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the death of Suleym ¨ an the Magnificent in ¯ 1566, the Empire was supposed to have entered a period of long decline that affected both its politicalmilitary fortunes and its cultural-intellectual output.1
Scholars of Arabic literature and thought were inclined to view the seventeenth century as yet another bleak chapter of cultural, intellectual, and societal “decadence” (inh. it.at¯.) that began with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and came to an end only with the “Arab awakening” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Historians who study self-styled Islamic “reformist” and “revivalist” movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have often portrayed the immediately preceding centuries as marked by unthinking scholarly “imitation” (taqlıd¯ ), crude Sufi pantheism, and “syncretic” and idolatrous popular religious practices.3 To be sure, such assessments are no longer accepted unquestioningly in academic circles. But their influence is still felt in the woefully underdeveloped state of research into the intellectual history of the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The tide is turning, though, and recent years have seen a number of valuable monographs, doctoral dissertations, and editions of scholarly works.4
The present book is intended as a contribution to the ongoing reassessment of the period. Its focus is on a number of hitherto unnoticed intellectual trends among the scholarly elite – the ulema – in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa in the seventeenth century. Though the ulema are mentioned in almost any history of the period, our knowledge of their intellectual preoccupations is still much more meager than our knowledge of their institutional contexts and their potential political role as intermediaries between rulers and ruled.5 This gap in our knowledge has tended to be reinforced by a number of factors. Most scholarly writings by seventeenth-century Ottoman ulema are in Arabic (not Turkish) and tend to be dense and technical – neither characteristic endearing them to Ottomanists. Modern historians have also tended to assume that the interests of the Ottoman ulema were by the seventeenth century quite narrow (largely confined to Islamic law, Quran exegesis, and grammar), and that their writings overwhelmingly consisted of unoriginal and pedantic commentaries and glosses on earlier works –assumptions that have not exactly invited closer study.6 Furthermore, intellectual history has itself been under something of a cloud in recent years.
The tendency of historians of ideas to focus on the intellectual elite and to situate ideas in the context of other ideas (as opposed to social and political realities) is sometimes seen as unfashionable.7 Many historians now prefer to explore new avenues of research untainted by suspicions of elitism and old fashion, for example, popular culture and mentalities. Some of this new research is impressive and very welcome.8 Less welcome, I think, is an unintended consequence of this shift in academic focus. “High” intellectual life in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa largely remains unexplored territory. Resting satisfied with this state of affairs and simply shifting research to other topics risks reinforcing the impression that on one side of the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century one encounters Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz, whereas on the other side one encounters popular chroniclers, Sufi diarists, popularizers of medical or occult knowledge, and the like. Studies of popular chroniclers, Sufi diarists, and popularizers of medical or occult knowledge are of course most welcome, but the present book is written with the assumption that there is still a legitimate place for the study of the ideas, issues, and controversies that preoccupied the “academics” of the period.
The book is divided into three parts, each consisting of three chapters. The first part deals with the influx into the Ottoman Empire of scholars from the Kurdish and Azeri areas, in part due to the conquest of these areas by the Shiite Safavids under Shah ʿAbbas I (r. ¯ 1588–1629). This westward movement seems to have had a profound impact on Ottoman scholarly culture.
Contemporary observers spoke of the “opening of the gate of verification,” the introduction of new works and teaching techniques, and the reinvigoration of the study of the rational and philosophical sciences. Two consequences are explored in some detail: the first is the explosion of interest in the science of dialectics (ad¯ ab al-bah ¯ . th) among Ottoman scholars from the seventeenth century; the second is the closely related rise of conscious reflection on the proper manner of perusing scholarly books (ad¯ ab al-mut ¯ .ala ¯ ʿa). Part II deals with the eastward movement of scholars and works from the Maghreb, connected both to the turmoil in Morocco that followed the collapse of the Saʿdid dynasty in 1603 and to the institution of the Hajj which brought North African scholars eastward, some settling in Egypt or the Hejaz. Again, this development had significant consequences. It led to the spread of the influence of the fifteenth-century North African scholar Muh. ammad b. Yusuf al-San ¯ us¯ ¯ı (d. 1490), whose works came to dominate the teaching of theology and logic in the Azhar college in Cairo from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. One of the hallmarks of this tradition is that it insisted on the inadequacy of “imitation” (taqlıd¯ ) as a basis for assent to the Islamic creed and instead stressed the necessity for the “verification” (tah. qıq¯ ) of the creed through demonstrative argument.
This in turn led to the writing of creedal works explicitly aimed at nonscholars, conveying the amount of rational theology (kalam¯ ) that every believer should know. Another characteristic of this tradition was an enthusiasm for logic (mant.iq) and an extensive use of logical concepts and argument forms in the field of rational theology – leading one eighteenth-century observer to complain of the predominance in Cairo in his time of what he called “theologian-logicians” (al-mutakallimın al- ¯ manat¯.iqa). Part III deals with the spread of Sufi orders from India and Azerbaijan into the Arabic-speaking areas of the Near East in the seventeenth century. This development led to the strengthening of the influence of the idea of “the unity of existence” (wah. dat al-wujud¯ ) associated with the followers of Ibn ʿArab¯ı (d. 1240) – an idea that until then had enjoyed little support from members of the ulema class in Syria, Hejaz, and Egypt. This led to the weakening of the hold of Ashʿar¯ı and Matur ¯ ¯ıd¯ı theology in these areas and to the reassertion of more “traditionalist,” near-H. anbal¯ı positions on a range of core theological issues. Paradoxical as it may sound, seventeenthcentury supporters of mystical monism seem to have played an important role in rehabilitating the ideas of the H. anbal¯ı thinker Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), for centuries an object of suspicion or neglect on the part of Ashʿar¯ı and Matur ¯ ¯ıd¯ı theologians. Some of the better-known scholars of the seventeenth century, such as Ah.med Muneccimb ¨ as¯ ¸¯ı (d. 1702), al-H. asan al-Yus¯ ¯ı (d. 1691), Ibrah¯ ¯ım Kur¯ an¯ ¯ı (d. 1690), and ʿAbd al-Ghan¯ı al-Nabulus ¯ ¯ı (1641–1731), feature prominently in the pages that follow. But my aim has been to discuss them as representatives of larger intellectual trends within the ulema class in their time, not as heroic figures who somehow managed to stand out in an otherwise bleak century.
After all, even older studies that perpetuated the image of seventeenth-century intellectual stagnation or decline were sometimes prepared to admit that there were “exceptions.”9 More recent scholarly literature has not succeeded in properly laying this idea to rest; indeed it has often succumbed to the temptation to underline the importance of an individual figure by portraying his background and opponents in dark colors.10 The list of “exceptions” has simply become too long for the idea to be taken seriously: Ah.mad al-Maqqar¯ı, al-H. asan al-Yus¯ ¯ı, Yah. ya al-Sh ¯ aw¯ ¯ı, and Muh. ammad al-Rud¯ an¯ ¯ı in the Maghreb; Ibrah¯ ¯ım Kur¯ an¯ ¯ı and his student Muh. ammad Barzinj¯ı in Medina; ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Baghd ¯ ad¯ ¯ı in Cairo; Khayr al-D¯ın alRaml¯ı in Palestine; Qasim al-Kh ¯ an¯ ¯ı in Aleppo; ʿAbd al-Ghan¯ı al-Nabulus ¯ ¯ı in Damascus; Ah.med Muneccimb ¨ as¯ ¸¯ı, K. ara Ḫal¯ıl T¯ırev¯ı, and Meh. med Sac¯ ¸ak. l¯ızade in Ottoman Turkey; Mus ¯ .t.afa M¯ ost ¯ ar¯ ¯ı in Bosnia; and Ah.mad H. usaynab¯ ad¯ ¯ı and his son H. aydar H. usaynab¯ ad¯ ¯ı in the Kurdish regions.11 It is high time to stop expanding the list of purported “exceptions” and to embark instead on an overall reappraisal of the period. What follows is an attempt to contribute toward this task. The three developments that I discuss are of course not exhaustive of the intellectual concerns of seventeenth-century ulema in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa.
Nevertheless, they should hopefully be sufficient to belie received views of the seventeenth century as intellectually barren or stagnant, passively awaiting “revival” and “reform,” and encourage further research on a rich intellectual tradition that has been overlooked for too long. Each of the three parts of the book opens with a chapter that traces scholarly lineages and the diffusion of works based on contemporary biographical and bibliographical sources. In each case, this is followed by chapters that discuss the contents of illustrative works belonging to the intellectual trends in question: on dialectic, on the proper manner of reading, on rational theology, and on mystical metaphysics. Some of these works are dense and technical, and the chapters that discuss their contents will to some extent have to engage with this density and technicality – this is simply unavoidable in any serious probing of the intellectual life of the ulema. Members of this group underwent years of arduous training in a range of scholarly disciplines, and their concerns were often abstruse and highbrow – not less so than those of present-day academics in the humanities and non-applied sciences.
To recover these concerns means not glossing over the contents of their works or treating them simply as epiphenomena of social context or political structures. It is all very well to complain that intellectual historians treat ideas as if they were divorced from institutional, social, and economic realities.12 But such worries seem misplaced when we know much more about the institutional, social, and economic realities than about the ideas. It is hardly controversial to point out that the study of the institutional, social, and economic history of the Ottoman Empire is significantly more developed than the study of its intellectual history. The more pressing danger, as I see it, is the tendency to think that the study of social, political, and institutional context somehow makes the close study of scholarly works superfluous – that intellectual history can simply be read off social and institutional history.13 Two aspects of the present book may occasion some surprise or concern.
One is that there will be next to no discussion of Islamic law or jurisprudence.14 Surely, one might object, those two fields were a major concern of the ulema class. The response to this is twofold: First, as already mentioned, I do not pretend that this book is an exhaustive survey of the intellectual history of the period. Second, it is precisely one of the points of the book that the question of “stagnation” and “decline” in Islamic intellectual history has unhelpfully tended to be associated with the development (or lack of development) of Islamic law and specifically with the question of ijtihad¯ – whether “the gate of ijtihad¯ ” was closed or remained open (or at least slightly ajar). This focus has, or so I would suggest, tended to elide the centrality of the ideal of “verification” (tah. qıq¯ ) for premodern Islamic scholarly culture.15 To put it bluntly, ijtihad¯ – the derivation of legal rulings directly from the acknowledged sources of Islamic law without being bound by legal precedent – was of little or no import for logicians, dialecticians, mathematicians, astronomers, grammarians, theologians, philosophers, and mystics. Even if one were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the “gate of ijtihad¯ ” was in fact closed, this would tell us nothing about the dynamism or stagnation of nonlegal fields of Islamic scholarship. The present book also eschews the use of terms such as “enlightenment” and “humanism.”
The study of Islamic and Ottoman intellectual life in the early modern period has been stimulated by the works of Reinhardt Schultze and Stefan Reichmuth – scholars who have contributed toward the rising interest in this period within the field of Islamic Studies.16 Nevertheless, their deployment of Western historical concepts such as “enlightenment” and “humanism” to characterize Islamic intellectual traditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must, I think, be rejected. To apply with even a minimum of plausibility to the Islamic early modern period, the meanings of such terms have to be stretched to such an extent that they arguably become devoid of historical content and become free-floating “ideas” not associated with any particular region or period.
Any emphasis on the need for critical reflection on received views or any rhetoric of praise for novelty and individual “illumination” is equated with “enlightenment”; any concern with letter-writing, collating manuscripts, and polymathy is equated with “humanism”; any fideist rejection of rationalist or mystical speculation is equated with “pietism,” and so on. Furthermore, the whole enterprise of attempting to capture a “zeitgeist” seems highly questionable, especially at a time when European historians are stressing the heterogeneity of intellectual and cultural pursuits in the early modern period and hence rethinking the usefulness of terms such as “the enlightenment” and “the scientific revolution.”17
Even apart from this point, the broad characterizations involved in speaking of an early modern Islamic “enlightenment” or “humanism” must surely be premature given just how little the period has been studied. In light of all this, it seems better to leave aside stimulating but overhasty attempts at capturing the age by a few “isms” imported from Western European historiography, and to start afresh by focusing on a number of intellectual currents and works, and describing these as far as possible in a language that would have been recognizable to the scholars whose outlook we as historians seek to understand. Once reasonably grounded narratives of the intellectual history of the period have been established, it may be fruitful to go further and ask comparative and “global” questions.18 But to let research in the fledgling field of Ottoman and North African intellectual history be guided from the outset by the desire to relate it to the much more advanced field of European intellectual history is sure to lead to lopsided emphases and tendentious readings of the sources.19
Instead of genuinely developing our sketchy knowledge of the intellectual history of the period, we would be stuck in a situation that development theorists once referred to as “the development of underdevelopment.” Having said this, preliminary methodological discussions and polemics will not take us far. At the end of the day, a historical approach is vindicated if it yields accounts of the past that are deemed instructive and worthwhile. To put it more proverbially, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The chapters that follow are themselves my main argument for taking the intellectual preoccupations of seventeenth-century Ottoman and North African ulema seriously, on their own terms.
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