The Islamic Enlightenment ─ The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times

With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Structuring his groundbreaking history around Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran, the three main loci of Islamic culture, The Islamic Enlightenment challenges the ossified perceptions in Western culture that self-righteously condemn the Muslim world as hopelessly benighted. This false perception belies the fact that Islamic civilization has been undergoing its own anguished transformation over the last two hundred years and that the violence of an infinitesimally small minority is the blowback from this process. In reclaiming the stories of the nineteenth-century philosophers, anti-clerics, journalists, and feminists who opened up their societies to political and intellectual emancipation, The Islamic Enlightenment shows the folly of Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are already drenched in it.