Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz before Wahhabism

INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE ḤIJĀZ BEFORE WAHHABISM: IBRĀHĪM AL-KŪRĀNĪ’S (D. 1101/1690) (D. 1101/1690) THEOLOGY OF SUFISM, by Naser Dumairieh . Leiden: Brill, 2022, 361pp . ISBN: 978-9004729674 .

Reviewed by: Zeeshan Mahmood, Nottingham, UK 

It is obvious that Islamicate intellectual histories are numerous in publication yet, typically, they concentrate on the ‘Classical’ era - from the time after the Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) up to the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-thirteenth century . This interest bias allows this time period to come to be seen, misleadingly, as the overarching framework to understanding Muslim scholarship. As for the much later post-Mongol sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has traditionally been a palpable lack of publication or even scholarly interest, from both Muslim researchers and non-Muslim orientalists. Effectively, this time period remains a “dark age” which spawns damning (but false) stereotypes that they were epochs of conservatism, fanaticism and even “decline”. Fortunately, this paucity is slowly but surely being remedied with a slew of academic studies in recent times, devoted to proving that Islamicate intellectualism has a richer, extended and interlinked history worth being recovered and told at long last.