Sunday 11 March 2018

Financial Times: When Islam met the Enlightenment


The Financial Times has a fascinating article called When Islam met the Enlightenment (28 February, 2018)  bout Europe's intellectual engagement with the Muslim world in the seventeenth century, including an analysis of some of the European literature prodused at the time on the subject:

"If their medieval progenitors were generally motivated by a desire to prove Islam a profane heresy from the east, this new and diverse Republic of Arabic letters adopted a cooler approach. They wrote in a less polemical key and recognised the culture of the Islamic world, so Bevilacqua writes, “as a holistic set of religious, intellectual, and literary traditions deserving respect and attention, and as an object of study that would yield intellectual, aesthetic, and even moral enrichment in a variety of fields”.

You can read the full article here.