Ahmad Dallal, “Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought” (UNC Press, 2018)

UNC Press Presents Podcast · Aug 21, 2018 · 1h 30m

In Middle Eastern and Islamic intellectual history, there has long been an assumption of decline in the eighteenth century, right before the nineteenth century, when the nahda or Arabic intellectual renaissance, began: intellectuals were caught in a period of stagnation and retrograde. Ahmad Dallal pushes back against this in Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), bringing together an intricate matrix of ideas stemming from multiple fields of knowledge. He pins this all together with the notion of reform…