Literary aestheticism and the formation of the notion of “Islamic civilization”

Date:

Fri, 09/14/2012 - 3:00pm to Mon, 01/24/2022 - 5:00pm

We tend to take for granted that there was an Islamic civilization some time in the past and many of us enjoy reading about it and studying it. But the concept of “Islamic civilization” only dates from the late 19th century, and this concept has had a distinct development in Muslim countries since that time. Whereas it originally referred to a closed phase in the progression of world history, it came to mean for, some Muslim intellectuals, an alternative to Western modernity that is required for the salvation of the human race in the present. This new understanding, which came about mainly in the 1920’s and 1930’s, was indebted to certain literary and aesthetic ideas that will be explored in this talk.