Offers an innovative reappraisal of the impact of Late Ottoman Turkish scholars on modern Islamic thought.

In this major contribution to Muslim intellectual history, Andrew Hammond offers a vital reappraisal of the role of Late Ottoman Turkish scholars in shaping modern Islamic thought. Focusing on a poet, a sheikh and his deputy, Hammond re-evaluates the lives and legacies of three key figures who chose exile in Egypt as radical secular forces seized power in republican Turkey: Mehmed Akif, Mustafa Sabri and Zahid Kevseri. Examining a period when these scholars faced the dual challenge of non-conformist trends in Islam and Western science and philosophy, Hammond argues that these men, alongside Said Nursi who remained in Turkey, were the last bearers of the Ottoman Islamic tradition. Utilising both Arabic and Turkish sources, he transcends disciplinary conventions that divide histories along ethnic, linguistic and national lines, highlighting continuities across geographies and eras. Through this lens, Hammond is able to observe the long-neglected but lasting impact that these Late Ottoman thinkers had upon Turkish and Arab Islamist ideology.

"This book is a study of the Muslim world's entanglement with colonial modernity. More specifically, it is an historical examination of the development of the long-standing, indigenous tradition of learning and praxis known as Islamic law (shari°a, fiqh) as a result of its imbalanced interaction with new European modes of knowing during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the colonial experience. Drawing upon the writings of jurist-scholars from the òHanaf åischool of law writing in Cairo, Kazan, Lucknow, Baghdad and Istanbul, Transformations of Tradition reveals several central shifts in Islamic legal writing that throw into doubt the possibility of reading its later trajectory through the lens of a continuous "tradition." By focusing especially on the work of Muòhammad Bakhåit al-Muòtåi°åi, Mufti of Egypt for a time and a leading scholar at the Azhar, Transformations shows that the colonial moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant rupture in how Muslim jurists understood history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned"--

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

Islamist Thinkers in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic offers an overview of the lives and ideas of thirteen influential Islamist thinkers. In the aftermath of the 1908 Revolution, Islamism became a prominent political ideology. In their writings, Islamist intellectuals analyzed and sought solutions to the social, economic and political issues of the empire. Their ideas constitute the blueprint for the Islamist-oriented political movements and parties that have been present in Turkish political life since the 1950s. This book is an important contribution to the study of late Ottoman intellectual history and the field of Islamic/Turkish political studies. It makes available in English important primary sources to scholars and students who have no access to these materials in their original languages.

This history of astronomy in Egypt reveals how modern science came to play an authoritative role in Islamic religious practice.

Does Islam make people violent? Does Islam make people peaceful? In this book, A. Kevin Reinhart demonstrates that such questions are misleading, because they assume that Islam is a monolithic essence and that Muslims are made the way they are by this monolith. He argues that Islam, like all religions, is complex and thus best understood through analogy with language: Islam has dialects, a set of features shared with other versions of Islam. It also has cosmopolitan elites who prescribe how Islam ought to be, even though these experts, depending on where they practice the religion, unconsciously reflect their own local dialects. Reinhart defines the distinctive features of Islam and investigates how modernity has created new conditions for the religion. Analyzing the similarities and differences between modern and pre-modern Islam, he clarifies the new and old in the religion as it is lived in the contemporary world.