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Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives in Turkey on the Understanding and Interpretation of the Qur’an
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The Turkish market of Qur’anic translations and studies is exceedingly oversaturated. Critics find some of these lacking in proper hermeneutical judgment, impelling them to reflect on the conditions of judicious Qur’anic exegesis. These reflections have remained relatively unexplored in English academic literature. In Critical Hermeneutics, Çelik explores and compares the hermeneutical philosophies of three Turkish intellectuals, namely Alpyağıl, Cündioğlu, and Öztürk. By exploring their philosophical views on subjectivity and objectivity in the context of interpreting the Qur’an, Çelik draws major implications for reading the Qur’an in new and different ways.
Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s (d. 1101/1690) Theology of Sufism
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In Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz before Wahhabism, Naser Dumairieh argues that, as a result of changing global conditions facilitating the movement of scholars and texts, the seventeenth-century Ḥijāz was one of the most important intellectual centers of the Islamic world, acting as a hub between its different parts.
Positioning Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī (d. 1101/1690) as representative of the intellectual activities of the pre-Wahhabism Ḥijāz, Dumairieh argues that his coherent philosophical system represents a synthesis of several major post-classical traditions of Islamic thought, namely kalām and Akbarian appropriations of Avicennian metaphysics. Al-Kūrānī’s work is the culmination of the philosophized Akbarian tradition; with his reconciliation of Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas with Ashʿarī theology, Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas became Islamic theology.
A Study of Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya
In Virtue, Piety and the Law Katharina Ivanyi examines Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s (d. 981/1573) al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya, a major work of pietist exhortation and advice, composed by the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist, Ḥadīth scholar and grammarian, who would articulate a style of religiosity that had considerable reformist appeal into modern times.

Linking the cultivation of individual virtue to questions of wider political, social and economic concern, Birgivī played a significant role in the negotiation and articulation of early modern Ottoman Ḥanafī piety. Birgivī’s deep mistrust of the passions of the human soul led him to prescribe a regime of self-surveillance and control that was only matched in rigor by his likewise exacting interpretation of the law in matters of everyday life, as much as in state practices, such as the cash waqf, Ottoman land tenure and taxation.
In A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century, Marinos Sariyannis offers a survey of Ottoman political texts, examined in a book-length study for the first time. From the last glimpses of gazi ideology and the first instances of Persian political philosophy in the fifteenth century until the apologists of Western-style military reform in the early nineteenth century, the author studies a multitude of theories and views, focusing on an identification of ideological trends rather than a simple enumeration of texts and authors. At the same time, the book offers analytical summaries of texts otherwise difficult to find in English.
The Russells of Braidshaw in Aleppo and on the Coast of Coromandel
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In The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad, Janet Starkey examines the lives and works of Scots working in the mid eighteenth century with the Levant Company in Aleppo, then within the Ottoman Empire; and those working with the East India Company in India, especially in the fields of natural history, medicine, ethnography and the collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts. The focus is on brothers from Edinburgh: Alexander Russell MD FRS, Patrick Russell MD FRS, Claud Russell and William Russell FRS.

By examining a wide range of modern interpretations, Starkey argues that the Scottish Enlightenment was not just a philosophical discourse but a multi-faceted cultural revolution that owed its vibrancy to ties of kinship, and to strong commercial and intellectual links with Europe and further abroad.