The Modern and the Mediterranean: The Age of Enlightenment in Europe and the Middle East

One might say that the Enlightenment changed everything. It is credited with fashioning the intellectual foundations of modernity, bringing reason and science to the forefront of public life, hastening the end of the ancien regime, pioneering constitutional government, sparking the American and French Revolutions along with modern nationalism, and much more. It has also been accused of thoughtlessly demolishing traditional societies, diminishing religious life, rationalising the imposition of European imperialism and colonialism upon the globe, and bringing about many of the ills of life as we know it. So which is it?

This course would seek to establish a balanced, critical assessment of what, exactly, the Enlightenment meant in the decades after it first appeared in print, along with its far-reaching influence across the centuries. Following trends in global history, this class would attempt to “de-centre” the Enlightenment from its typical European moorings and investigate what it meant for the inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria, Istanbul and Baghdad. Intellectual, cultural, and social interchange and transformation in Europe and the Middle East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be examined. The first half of the course will cover primarily the intellectual foundations in Europe of the diffuse movement called the Enlightenment, and the second half will migrate across the Mediterranean to see how Egypt and the wider Ottoman world contributed, responded, and reacted to les lumières during an era when the world was turned upside down.

Through careful analysis of primary texts, historical interpretation, and competing interpretative frameworks, this class would seek to arrive at a deeper, multilayered understanding of this complex epoch; that will perhaps shed insight into the birth pains of the modern world, what was gained, and what was lost.