The Islamic Enlightenment

February 13, 2017
In this expansive historical account and commentary, de Bellaigue (In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs) recounts Islam’s “painful encounter with modernity” through the history of Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. The text is broad in scope and bold in its aims, attempting to chart the sometimes contradictory and manifold contours of this “Islamic Enlightenment” and disturb paternalistic notions of “the Muslim world” on the part of imprudent Western observers. De Bellaigue does well to manage a wide swathe of political, economic, religious, and cultural historical personages in the vortex among Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran, but his tone can be condescending, and his treatment of Islamic theologies of reform is overly simplistic. Even so, this is a text that demands attention for its splendid prose, command of an entire treasury of history, and ability to undermine the misplaced patronization of Middle Eastern Muslim nations over the last 300 years.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
A pertinent study of how the Islamic world played quick catch-up to the West over the course of the 19th century.Contrary to patronizing observations by Westerners when confronted in the early 19th century with the "backwardness" of the Muslim East, the three centers of Islamic culture and intellect--Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran--were undergoing turbulent inner revolution. In this well-organized and impressively concise yet sweeping history, British journalist and author de Bellaigue (Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup, 2012, etc.) takes as his narrative point of departure the clash of East and West that occurred with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and concludes with the growing "counter-enlightenment" that has taken root since the 1980s. A brief look back reveals that what shuttered the once famously tolerant and open Islamic society of the eighth and ninth centuries, in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordoba, was the inner schism between Sunni and Shia, the threat of the Crusades and Reconquista, and suspicion regarding rationalism. Intellectual curiosity and "a joyful engagement with the mechanics of the world" channeled into "a system for throttling human potential." With Napoleon came the challenge of embracing new forms of knowledge and innovation--or resisting them. Most importantly, whose side was God on? In an accessible, consistently informative narrative, the author delves into the lives and achievements of specific modernizers, many of them autocrats like Egypt's Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottomans' Mahmud II, and Iran's Abbas Mirza; and more subtle writers who helped generate their country's sense of self, such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Namik Kemal. De Bellaigue emphasizes that while the spur to modernization in Egypt was Napoleon, in the Ottoman Empire, it was defeat by the Russians, while in Iran, it was the country's relative isolation as well as its shared Persian language. The counter-enlightenment accompanied the growing distrust of the West. A nonscholarly work that lay readers will find especially engaging.

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November 15, 2016
Many Westerners see Islam as behind the times, having failed to experience Europe's Enlightenment. But Bellaigue, an authority on Islam and the Middle East who speaks Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, argues that in the last two centuries Islam has been undergoing a political and intellectual upheaval akin to the Enlightenment.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.