The nineteenth century in the historiography of Islam

Albert Hourani called the ‘long’ nineteenth century (c. 1798–1939) ‘the Liberal Age’ in Arabic thought, a period of ‘modernity’ among the intellectual elite of the Middle East first evidenced in the work of thinkers exposed to European thought such as Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73). In such a view the nineteenth century and what is considered to be the ‘modern’ period of Middle Eastern history more generally is seen as starting with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. However, Peter Gran has demonstrated that, well established though this periodisation may be in international scholarship, we should not lose perspective on pre-existing indigenous processes of modernisation by investing too much in such landmark divisions of time. As Gran has argued, both the economic and the cultural history of the later eighteenth century demonstrate the emergence of patterns of social transformation usually ascribed to the influence of the ‘Western penetration’ of Muslim societies actually developing indigenously for decades before the arrival of the French.

It is important to recognise such indigenous social changes as they serve to establish the local frameworks for the integration of various new technologies that were introduced through the spread of European imperial interests. At the same time, however, it is also clear that increasing European influence in Muslim societies was a factor in the acceleration of the pace and scope of cultural and economic transformations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.