This book investigates the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period.

A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century. Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty. This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.

"The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England" deals with the remarkably widespread interest in Arabic in seventeenth-century England among Biblical scholars and theologians, natural philosophers and Fellows of the Royal Society, and others. It led to the institutionalisation of Arabic studies at Oxford and Cambridge Universities where Arabic chairs were set up, and immense manuscript collections were established and utilised. Fourteen historians examine the extent and sources of this Arabic interest in areas ranging from religion, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, philology, and alchemy to botany. Arabic is shown to have been a significant component of the rise of Protestant intellectual tradition and the evolution of secular scholarship at universities.

Henry Stubbe (1632–1676) was a revolutionary English scholar who understood Islam as a monotheistic revelation in continuity with Judaism and Christianity. His major work, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, was the first English text to positively document the Prophet Muhammad’s life, celebrate the Qur’an as a divine revelation, and praise the Muslim toleration of Christians, undermining a long legacy of European prejudice and hostility. Nabil Matar, a leading scholar of Islamic-Western relations, standardizes Stubbe’s text and situates it within England’s theological climate. He shows how, to draw a positive portrait of Muhammad, Stubbe embraced travelogues, early church histories, Arabic chronicles, Latin commentaries, and studies on Jewish customs and scriptures, produced in the language of Islam and in the midst of the Islamic polity.

How has fundamentalism betrayed the true spirit of Islam? This fully revised and expanded edition of the critically acclaimed book provides answers to this question and contains: a new essay on the role of women in Islam; an updated chapter containing insights into the true nature of the jih three fully revised chapters that bring the discussion up-to-date with the current global situation; a revised introduction. Book jacket.