1 - The Late Ottoman Intellectual Tradition

Summary

The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) looks at historiographical problems in both Islamic history and the intellectual history of the Late Ottoman period, with sections including a review of the literature, a discussion of the construction of Islam as a world religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century public and scholarly discourse in the West, an examination of the discourse of Ottoman and Islamic ’decline’ and how Islamic modernism and Salafism relate to that discourse, and a review of the Late Ottoman problematisation of Islam as a social and political category.