Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 22-SEP-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Cook, Michael
Article Excerpt
Last June I participated in a very unusual assignment at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. Our task was to compare the intellectual histories of the three major non-Western literate traditions in the early modern period--alias the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, for those who find the term 'modern' tendentious in such a context. In addition to conceiving the idea and convening the class, Sheldon Pollock, a Sanskritist at Columbia, was the primary representative of the Hindu tradition. Benjamin Elman, a historian of East Asia at Princeton, performed the same role for the Chinese tradition. My corner of the field was the Islamic world. In addition, Peter Burke was there to provide the perspective of a Europeanist, and several younger scholars helped us out in a number of ways.
Here is the general issue we addressed, even if we never came very close to resolving it. All three intellectual traditions were profoundly conservative, in the sense that they were strongly inclined to locate authority and virtue in the past. Yet during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries all three were exposed to the initial stages of a development very different from any they had experienced before: the emergence of the modern world, which was eventually to end the intellectual autonomy of each of these traditions. In the meantime, did these new circumstances generate any significant convergences among the three traditions?
Against this background, the theme of attitudes to intellectual innovation naturally caught our comparative interest. In this brief space, I will attempt a quick sketch of these attitudes as they appeared in the Islamic world, followed by some bold--not to say crude--comparative observations.
The Islamic world of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had a strongly conservative orientation toward intellectual innovation. Of course, every culture has to balance innovation...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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