Introduction

Early modern Islamic reform can be classified under two general rubrics: the first encompasses the eighteenth century reform activities that preceded the cultural impact of Europe. The second includes a spectrum of nineteenth century reforms that were articulated in response to this impact. Naturally, there can be no single date that marks the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the modern period, as European penetration and domination took hold at difierent dates in different places. Moreover, since the extent and significance ofthe encounter with Europe was not simultaneously appreciated in all parts of the Muslim world, the cultural eighteenth century sometimes lingered past the colonial takeover.

Traditional scholarship asserts that the eighteenth century is a century of political and economic decline and of intellectual stagnation, and that an era of political and intellectual revival and reform ensues in the nine teenth century primarily as a result of the growth of European influence in, and the resulting intellectual challenges to, the Muslim world.1 The reaction or response to Europe became the central criterion for defining Islamic reform.2 This approach has privileged one particular kind of intellectual activity, namely that which responded to the 'European challenge’ by adapting itself to it. While the idea of economic and political decline has been largely discredited in a substantial number of studies, especially by historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman

1  See, for example, H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic society and the West: A study of the impact of Western civilization on Moslem culture in the Near East, vol. I: Islamic society in the eighteenth century, parts i and 2 (London, 1950 7); and P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton and B. Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge history of Islam, vol. IA, The central Islamic lands from pre Islamic times to the First World War (Cambridge, 1970).

2 See, for example, Albert Hourani’s introduction to his Arabic thought in the liberal age, 1798 1939 (Cambridge, 1983).

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Provinces,3 the present chapter will focus on the less studied realm of culture. In this realm, the eighteenth century was characterised by inten sive intellectual activities of great cultural significance. These activities continued traditional patterns of thinking but were nonetheless very original and transformative.

Already in the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century, the central governments of the three major empires of the Muslim world, the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals, were losing some oftheir control over their provinces and subjects. Changes in the structures of society and economy in each of these states were also coupled with military vulnerability and loss of territory. These gradual changes culminated in the eighteenth century in a number of dramatic events that underscore the historical distinctiveness of this period. In 1718, the Ottomans signed a treaty which forced them to surrender parts of the Balkans; mindful of the weakening of its military position relative to Europe, the Ottoman state attempted to reform its bureaucracy and military by importing some of the organisational and tech nological practices of their European rivals. Around the same period, an Afghan invasion of Iran ended the Safavid dynasty in 1722 and, in 1739, Nadir Shah, the new ruler of Iran, sacked Delhi and sealed the fate of an already weakened Mughal dynasty. Contrary to common assumptions, the weaken ing or even demise of these centralised and centralising states did not plunge the Muslim world into a period of irreversible stagnation. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, autonomous local powers with vibrant and revived economies emerged in several provinces including Mount Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt.4

Almost invariably, historians who adopted the paradigm of decline also treated the Wahhabi movement as the representative movement of the eighteenth century. However, eighteenth century Wahhabism was an iso lated phenomena which emerged out of the Najd, the desert region of Arabia, and managed to overrun Mecca and Medina, the cultured cities of IHijaz, due to declining Ottoman control over this region. The brief expansion of Wahhabi power was reversed through the intervention of the armies of

3  See, for example, H. Islamoglu (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the world economy (Cambridge, 1987); R. Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: The nineteenth century (Albany, 1988). See also Beshara Doumani, Discovering Palestine: Merchants and peasants in Jebal Nablus, 1700 1900 (Berkeley, 1995); Hala Fattah, Thepolitics of regional trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1745 1900 (Albany, 1997); and Dina Khoury, State andprovincial society in the early modern Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1740 1834 (Cambridge, 1997).

4  Joel Beinin, Workers and peasants in the modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2001).