Was There a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth-Century Egypt?

Abstract

It is a common assumption that intellectual life in the ArabicIslamic world entered a period of stagnation or after the 13th or 14th century. The intellectual inertia is supposed to have lasted until the 19th century, when a more dynamic and vital Europe thrust itself upon the region. This overall interpretation of the course of Arabic-Islamic intellectual history seems never to have been the conclusion of careful and dispassionate historical investigation. We simply know too little about the intellectual life of the Arabic-Islamic world between 1400 and 1800 to be able to justify such an unflattering comparison with the earlier, so-called classical age of Arabic-Islamic civilisation. In recent decades, the idea that the period between 1500 and 1800 constituted a period of overall decline has been challenged. Both Roger Owen and Andre Raymond have questioned this assumption when it comes to the economic and social history of the Middle East during these centuries.' There has also recently been some interest in the question of whether a general intellectual revival was already well under way, before Napoleon's troops conquered Egypt in 1798. In his Islamic Roots of Capitalism (1978), Peter Gran argued