Abstract

Scholarship on the Islamic eighteenth century has traditionally argued that it was a century of disarray, stagnation, fragmentation of tradition, and decline. This widely accepted scholarly view asserts that the eighteenth century is one of political and economic decline and intellectual stagnation. According to this view, an era of political and intellectual revival and reform follows in the nineteenth century primarily as a result of the growth of European influence in, and the resulting intellectual challenges to, the Muslim world.

More recently, some revisionist historians have convincingly criticised notions of a comprehensive social and economic decline in the eighteenth century, and have put forth the thesis of alternative and simultaneous Enlightenments that were not restricted to Europe. These studies often invite historians to shift the focus of research from the sphere of culture to that of political economy. The search for an Islamic Enlightenment is part of a larger project that seeks to identify in the past trends that anticipate a modern (or progressive or liberal) present. In other words, the purpose of the search for this alternative Enlightenment is to locate the moment of inauguration of an indigenous Islamic modernity, and more broadly, to construct renditions of the past that make it possible to deploy it in the present.

In the presentation, the speaker argued that the Enlightenment thesis suffers from two interrelated shortcomings: first, the invitation to move away from the study of culture and to focus on political economy implies that although there is cultural stagnation in the eighteenth century, we are likely to reach different conclusions if we focus our attention on political economy. While this is meant as a critique of Orientalist historiography, it in effect concedes the longstanding Orientalist assumption that the eighteenth century is, nevertheless, a low point in Islamic culture. The second shortcoming is that this thesis fails to identify what, if anything, is original about the Islamic eighteenth century. The presentation assessed the implications of the Islamic Enlightenment thesis and evaluated it in light of the evidence of the eighteenth century.