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Abstract

Zoom series on the Persistence of Islamic Scholarship in the Early Modern Period

Organizers: Berenike Metzler, Patrick Franke, and Ahmed Gad Makhlouf

Cultural and intellectual history does not follow the same rhythm as that of states. Its developments are slower and more subtle than the abrupt sociopolitical upheavals brought about by wars and conquests. While working on the Ottoman period, with the aim of understanding the impact of the conquest of the Arab provinces on Sufism’s intellectual and social history, the importance of the fifteenth century - the century of Suyūtī - became strikingly apparent. With the advent of the Ottomans, Cairo was no longer the capital of an empire as Egypt had become a distant province with its center now located in Istanbul. Yet cultural and intellectual transformations had preceded the conquest. The creation of the Ottoman Empire nonetheless introduced a major novelty: it enabled the dissemination of medieval knowledge, with its rich apparatus of commentary, from Egypt to Syria and the Hijāz, through scholarly networks connecting the Muslim East and West - networks in which al-Suyūtī’s influence was particularly remarkable. Al-Suyūtī’s scholarship was, indeed, exceptional. This presentation will focus on the historical context that allowed for the emergence of scholarly circles within which a rich historiographical culture developed, alongside an intense engagement with hadīth studies, large-scale works of synthesis, and the deep embedding of Sufism within learned culture. Finally, we will examine the international circulation of this knowledge in the early modern period, marked by the growth of major Arab cities and the expansion of pilgrimage routes.

Bio

Rachida Chih is a Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies (CETOBAC), as part of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), in Paris. Her research focuses on the history, literature, and anthropology of Sufism and Sufi orders in early modern and modern Egypt and Morocco. Her most recent publications include Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal, and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Routledge, 2019); « Prophetic Piety, Mysticism, and Authority in Premodern Arabic Devotional Literature: al-Jazuli's Dala'il al-Khayrat (15th Century) » (IJMES, 2022); The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam, edited with Stefan Reichmuth, et al., 3 volumes (Brill, Leiden, 2021-2023).

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