The Persisting Spectre of Cultural Decline: Historiographical Approaches to Muslim Scholarship in the Early Modern Maghreb
This article examines how historiography has interpreted the development of Muslim scholarship in early modern North Africa. It focuses on the continuing influence of what I call the “decline narrative” on both national historiographies and Western specialist studies. Elaborated in the context of Fr...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2017
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| In: |
Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
Year: 2017, Volume: 60, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 142-173 |
| Further subjects: | B
Muslim scholarship
B Islamic literature B Intellectual History B historiography of the Maghrib B early modern North Africa |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article examines how historiography has interpreted the development of Muslim scholarship in early modern North Africa. It focuses on the continuing influence of what I call the “decline narrative” on both national historiographies and Western specialist studies. Elaborated in the context of French colonialism and consecrated by nationalist-cum-reformist discourses, the denunciation of the centuries preceding colonial conquest as an epoch of decadence has hardly been challenged. Beginning with the French historian and sociologist Jacques Berque (1910-95), however, there was a vivid interest amongst social scientists in early modern Islamic culture. The main part of the paper will be dedicated to a methodological analysis of some of these works, and, in the concluding section, I will discuss the degree to which the study of the diffusion of Islamic literacy in rural areas may serve as a starting point for a renewed approach to Islamic literature and its social foundations. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5209 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341422 |