There is some very interesting material in this book. It includes an excellent account of modern Arab enlightenment movements broadly defined, and their connections to attempts to establish a role for the use of reason in modern Islamic thought. The discussion of the concept of enlightenment in the Islamic world is limited to the Arab world and ignores everywhere else, but it is good to have an account of that cultural environment, and this book nicely counters the myth that the Arab world needs an enlightenment. As many have pointed out, there have been too many, rather than too few, enlightenments, or putative enlightenments.The role of Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, in these enlightenments is a highly controversial issue. The author does well in describing how Ibn Rushd is used to sanction what people have said and done in the name of defending the role of reason in the Arab world. Tamamy concludes that Ibn Rushd has nothing to do with any enlightenment, and if it is true this is an important point. Unfortunately, Tamamy arrives at this conclusion in a very strange way. He begins the book by saying that Ibn Rushd is often regarded as an enlightenment thinker, and he continues by pointing out that the philosopher Immanuel Kant is the main standard bearer of the European Enlightenment. He argues that Kant and Ibn Rushd have very different views, and so the latter cannot be an enlightenment thinker. It is a poor argument. No one suggested that there was much alignment between the views of the thinkers; they are separated by hundreds of years and worked in very different cultural environments. Clearly Ibn Rushd was not a critical philosopher in the sense of the expression that Kant used. On the other hand, it has been argued, rightly or wrongly, that Ibn Rushd played an important role in the European Enlightenment and that argument is based partially on causal factors and partially on the implications of his views. It is certainly true that far too many vague and woolly things are said about the connection, but that does not mean there is no connection.The problem with the book is that this possible connection is not debunked; it is totally ignored. It should be said that Tamamy does a good job rejecting exaggerated claims of Ibn Rushd's influence. There is, after all, the widely supported thesis that because Ibn Rushd mentions Plato's idea in the Republic that women should be allowed to do what men do, he is a feminist! What makes this thesis even more ridiculous is that it is based on a commentary, so Ibn Rushd is just reporting on something that Plato is taken to have said, not endorsing it nor giving his own views on it. The idea that Ibn Rushd is an early advocate of equal opportunity for women, or even a feminist, is laughable, which is not to say that it has not often been suggested. As Tamamy correctly reports, extravagant claims have been made about the importance of Ibn Rushd, and cooler heads should prevail in working out precisely what his contribution has been to philosophy.There is an argument of greater weight that holds that Averroism in the Christian and Jewish worlds lasted a long time and had an impact on what came next in the Renaissance and beyond. It is certainly true that many of the Averroistic ideas had little directly to do with Ibn Rushd, and in Jewish philosophy, they were often more Maimonidean than Averroistic. What intellectuals got from Ibn Rushd was the importance of a distinction between religious and philosophical language, and the demonstrative superiority of the latter over the former. That is a radical idea in a culture that sees religion as the hegemonic cultural force. To a certain extent, this idea is also present in Kant; he also sharply distinguishes between different kinds of language, but in a very different manner. It has been argued that Ibn Rushd has played a major role in the progressive European attempts at demoting religion and expanding the role of rationality. You do not have to be an advocate of the theories of Kurt Flasch on the Renaissance or Jürgen Mittelstraß on later European culture to wonder if Ibn Rushd might have had an impact. Incidentally, both these thinkers are totally ignored in this book, as are all historical accounts of how Averroism might have had an impact on later European culture. The book originated as a British doctoral thesis, and like so many such works does not trouble itself with any arguments that do not appear in English or in this case in Arabic. French, Italian, and German scholarship on the issue is treated as though it never existed, and yet it is there, rightly or wrongly, that the link between Ibn Rushd and the Enlightenment is most comprehensively fleshed out. Perhaps all of this scholarship is wrong, and it is certainly very speculative, but it needs some form of engagement.Within the limits that he sets himself, the author spends a lot of time and space arguing against a proposition for which no one has ever argued, and he is very successful in establishing his case. Yes, clearly Kant is not Ibn Rushd and vice versa. But then no one supposed they were. Perhaps after reading the book no one ever will, and that is an achievement of sorts. While we may disagree with the rather naive enthusiasm of Renan and others for the European Enlightenment and Ibn Rushd's putative role in its Arab version, the Nahdah, the broad principle is correct. Ibn Rushd did have a challenging doctrine of the superiority of philosophy over the other Islamic sciences. His theory was not essentially different from many of the other falasifah, but he describes it in starker terms than was common in the tradition, and perhaps his career in public life suffered as a result. He certainly had a tempestuous political life, but whether this had anything to do with his philosophical work cannot be said.An interesting issue that the author ignores is the extent to which we should look at what a thinker directly says, and also the extent to which we should look at the implications of what he says. How far are we entitled to extend an author's views to explore what we take to be their logical implications, but not necessarily what the author himself took his views to be? Narrow historical concerns might persuade us to restrict what we say about a thinker to precisely the views he would have identified with and leave it at that. This is problematic in philosophy, since philosophical ideas are not designed merely to deal with a specific historical issue but are taken to have much wider range. It is by no means misleading to connect a thinker with the drawn out consequences of his thought even if he himself would not have drawn those consequences. For instance, many formulations of the ontological argument would not meet the approval, I am sure, of Anselm, and yet we do recognize them as aspects of the same proof and part of the problematic so acutely defined by Anselm himself.Similarly, it is by no means inappropriate to identify with Ibn Rushd the demand for a new balance of power in human thought between religion and reason, where the latter is given the leading role. This idea is pregnant with many other ideas, and came to have a revolutionary impact in the intellectual world and that suggests that we should regard Ibn Rushd as indeed a modern thinker. For a very long time, theology was taken to be the leading intellectual form of inquiry, and yet Ibn Rushd argues that it is secondary in theoretical power to philosophy. This is more than just a technical detail—it is a debate about power. Who has the authority to define the meaning of religious statements when they are unclear or indeterminate, the theologian or the philosopher? One would normally think that theological language would fall within the domain of theology and the theologian, and it does generally, when it is without any difficulty. When there are problems, they have to be dealt with by the philosopher. According to Ibn Rushd, only the philosopher has the theoretical power to resolve such issues. This is a very modern thought and may well have played a role in the consigning of theology to a subsidiary role in Western culture.The material in the book on Kant is prolix and derivative and the author does not really use it constructively. On the other hand, his account of Ibn Rushd and other Islamic peripatetic thinkers is excellent, as is his grasp of the various versions of the Arab enlightenments. The discussion of Ibn Rushd's relationship with al-Farabi is useful and one of the author's strengths is identifying what is original in Ibn Rushd as compared with the tradition within which he operated. But on the whole, the comparison with Kant does not operate effectively. We learn nothing about either thinker through the comparison, apart from the fact that they have little in common. I imagine most philosophers knew that already.