2014 Theses Doctoral
Al-Azhar and the Orders of Knowledge
Founded by the Fatimids in 970 A.D., al-Azhar has been described variously as "the great mosque of Islam," "the brilliant one," "a great seat of learning...whose light was dimmed." Yet despite its assumed centrality, the illustrious mosque-seminary has elicited little critical study. The existing historiography largely relies on colonial-nationalist teleologies that are grounded in a strong centrifugal essentialism: positioning Cairo (and al-Azhar) at a center, around which faithfully revolve concentric peripheries.
Setting its focus on the eighteenth century and beyond, this dissertation investigates the discursive postulates that organize the writing of the history of al-Azhar. Through textual explorations that pivot in space and time, it elucidates shifts in the entanglement of disciplines of knowledge with those of the self at a particular historical juncture and location. It thus locates al-Azhar in the modern order of knowledge, even as it imagines another intellectual universe bound by ideas, texts and authors who lived before and outside Europe: one which articulated itself in conceptual, epistemic, moral, social, cultural and institutional ways, modernity as such cannot not capture.
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Files
- Gubara_columbia_0054D_12270.pdf application/pdf 5.29 MB Download File
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- History
- Thesis Advisors
- Bulliet, Richard W.
- Degree
- Ph.D., Columbia University
- Published Here
- August 15, 2014