About this item
A revelatory and game-changing narrative that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the modern history of the Islamic world. With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Structuring his groundbreaking history around Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran, the three main loci of Islamic culture, The Islamic Enlightenment challenges the ossified perceptions in Western culture that self-righteously condemn the Muslim world as hopelessly benighted. This false perception belies the fact that Islamic civilization has been undergoing its own anguished transformation over the last two hundred years and that the violence of an infinitesimally small minority is the blowback from this process. In reclaiming the stories of the nineteenth-century philosophers, anti-clerics, journalists, and feminists who opened up their societies to political and intellectual emancipation, The Islamic Enlightenment shows the folly of Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are already drenched in it. 8 pages of color and 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations
About the Author
Born in London in 1971, Christopher de Bellaigue has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, IN THE ROSE GARDEN OF THE MARTYRS: A MEMOIR OF IRAN, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. His second book, THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAN, was a collection of 14 essays on Iranian culture and politics, all of which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, REBEL LAND: UNRAVELING THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY IN A TURKISH TOWN, was shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell Book Prize for political writing. Christopher de Bellaigue is the Tehran correspondent for The Economist and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in London with his wife and two children.