The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times

By Christopher de Bellaigue

Categories: History

The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times (2017) is a history by Christopher de Bellaigue. De Bellaigue shows how Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran engaged intellectual, scientific and political modernization across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, he challenges the claim that Muslim societies never wrestled with reform, reason and European power.

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• Fareed Zakaria: “This week's book of the week is Christopher de Bellaigue's "The Islamic Enlightenment." This is one of the most important books on Islam that I have read. Can Islam reform? The book answers the question by looking back over the last century and a half, and it describes the struggle that the religion has had to modernize, the forces that are helping liberalize the faith and those that hold it back -- a rich, complex, well-wrought account of this crucially important subject.”